Painting for a Living in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History, 43) 1783276630, 9781783276639

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Volume 43

PAINTING FOR A LIVING IN TUDOR AND EARLY STUART ENGLAND

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Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History ISSN: 1476–9107 Series editors Tim Harris – Brown University Stephen Taylor – Durham University Andy Wood – Durham University Previously published titles in the series are listed at the back of this volume

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PAINTING FOR A LIVING IN TUDOR AND EARLY STUART ENGLAND

Robert Tittler

THE BOYDELL PRESS

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© Robert Tittler 2022 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation ‎no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, ‎published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, ‎transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, ‎without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Robert Tittler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2022 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978–1–78327–663–9 hardback ISBN 978–1–80010–414–3 ePDF The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd ‎PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK ‎and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. ‎668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA ‎website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate Cover image: Anon., A Painter at his Easel, c. 1580. (Detail from a double-sided portrait of Sir Christopher Hatton). © National Portrait Gallery, London; in the collection of Northampton Museums and Art Gallery Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

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Most of all, this is for Anne

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Contents List of Illustrations viii Preface x Acknowledgements xii Editorial Conventions and Abbreviations xiv Part I. Introduction Introduction: Priming the Canvas

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1. Painters before the Reformation

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Part II. Kinds of People 2. The Stranger-Painters

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3. The Painter-Stainers’ Company of London

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4. Provincial Painters

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Part III. Particular Specialities 5. Arms Painters

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6. Glass Painters

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Part IV. Ways and Means 7. The Workshop Personnel

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8. The Workshop Space

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9. The Business of Painting

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V. Conclusion 10. An Occupation in Transition

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Bibliography 243 Index 271

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Illustrations Figures

1. Hans Holbein the Younger, attr. Lucas Horenbout (c. 1540). Wallace Collection, London, UK/Bridgeman Images, TWC67600.

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2. Melchoir Salaboss, The Cornwall Family Monument (1588), St Mary’s Church, Burford, Shropshire. © Historic England Archive.

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3. The Dutch Church, Austin Friars, drawn in the late eighteenth century. From John Britton and E.W. Brayley, Beauties of England and Wales (1801–16).

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4. The Dutch Triumphal Arch for the Entry of James I (1604), from Stephen Harrison, The Arche’s of Triumph erected in Honor of the high and Mighty Prince Iames: the firsts of that name (1613). Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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5. Anon., The Officers of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1632). By kind permission of the Master and Wardens of the Worshipful Company of Painter-Stainers, London.

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6. Richard Scarlett, The Funeral of Sir Henry Unton (c. 1606). © National Portrait Gallery, London, 710.

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7. Anon., Commandment Board (1587), St Margaret’s Church, Tivetshall St Margaret, Norfolk. By kind permission of Colin Canfield. 92 8. The Phoenix Tower, Chester. © Ms Naomi J. Hughes; Historic England Archive.

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9. Randle Holme, Sir Roger Mostyn (1621). Mostyn Hall, Flintshire. By permission of Lord Mostyn and Mostyn Estates Ltd.

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10. John Souch, Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife (1635). Manchester City Art Gallery, UK/Bridgman Images, MAN176499.

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11. Randle Holme’s residence (‘Ye Olde King’s Head’), Chester, c. 1620s. By permission of History Hub at the Grosvenor Museum, ref. ch7996. 107 12. Anon., John Kaye, Arms of his Family and Friends (1567). © Kirklees Museum and Galleries, KLMUS 1990/399A (verso).

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13. Esther Inglis, ‘Self-Portrait’ from Esther Inglis, Argumenta Psalmorum (London, 1606), detail. MS Typ 212 (f.9v), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

14. The ‘Arch-topped Portrait Set’. © The Society of Antiquaries of London. 213 15. Nicholas Stone, Funeral Monument of Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1627), Parish Church of St Mary, Culford, Suffolk. © Tate Gallery, London. 241 Tables

1. Painters in East Anglia, 1500–1640.

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2. Apprentices: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640.

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3. Journeymen: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640.

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4. Masters: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640.

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The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Preface This study has followed a long and winding path which began many years ago with work on the conventional political history of early modern England. Guided by the allure of human activity at the ground level of the local community, that route has meandered through groves of political and then social history, and made long detours into the realms of vernacular building and both civic and material culture. More recently it has entailed extended and enlightening sojourns amongst art historical and curatorial communities at the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. It has always entailed frequent fuelling stops in the repositories of local and provincial as well as national and metropolitan archives, taking on information, ideas, and inspiration along the way. But it rarely departed for long from that different country of the past which begins with the accession of the Tudors and comes to a climactic end with the downfall of Charles I. This latest report of the journey’s progress follows on the heels of three earlier monographs which have attempted to link the realms of local and social history on the one hand with those of visual and material culture on the other: an investigation of architecture and political power in urban communities (1995), a study of civic portraiture in those same sorts of communities (2007), and a work on the emergence of a public for portraiture in provincial England (2012). From the very outset of these meanderings, and especially while working on the role of town halls in the urban communities of early modern England, I began to notice that many such buildings displayed portraits of their founders or local worthies. Most were anonymously and not very well painted: their crude, craft-like quality itself caught my eye. On trying to ascertain who painted them I more often than not came up blank. Those names which did surface in the archives usually disappeared when I searched for them in published scholarship. Yet these painters had obviously gained local importance in the towns and parishes which engaged their services. They had contributed to the material fabric and cultural heritage of their communities. Those observations struck me as worth noting. I began to keep track of their names and vowed to look into them, and their work, at a later time. That initially idle pursuit came to form the core of what became an online database of Early Modern British Painters (EMBP) in the era 1500–1640: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/980096. This has grown to some 2,800 biographical entries. It includes every man and woman whom I have been able to identify as having painted for a living in the British Isles between 1500 and 1640. Creating the EMBP database eventually involved a thorough searching of published sources, but also as thorough a search, via internet and on-site visit, as I could manage in many two- and three-week research trips over the years. That constant trawling, plus the welcome contributions of the many sympathetic x

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PREFACE

fisherfolk listed below, has revealed all sorts of information about those who painted in Tudor and early Stuart England. Updated six times as of this writing, EMBP has become a useful reference source, and readers of this book may find themselves dipping into it as they read on. But, devoid as it is of interpretation or analysis, it remains an exercise in documentation rather than historical scholarship. ‘Doing History’ must always entail analysis and it must always place its subject in a meaningful explanatory context. Documentation alone only offers the raw material. The work at hand attempts to translate that documentation into historical investigation. It is not, as will quickly be evident, a work of traditional art history, which I feel unqualified to attempt. Those primarily interested in an analysis of artistic style, or, indeed, of art itself, will find a copious published scholarship elsewhere. But I do hope to offer a useful commentary on subjects germane to that field as well as to a number of other fields which are contingent upon it. Those subjects include the economic and social aspects of the painters’ occupation over time, the organization of labour provided by the guild system in which many of them were enrolled, the interface between the stranger-painters and the native English painters (and between those respective approaches to the craft), the physical and geographic setting of the painter’s activity, and the place accorded to painters in their ambient society. In addition, I strive to present painters in the context of their times, and as deeply influenced by the wider currents of this protean era in England’s past. Those more expert than I in some of those myriad disciplines will no doubt find imperfections and misunderstandings, and for these infelicities I take sole responsibility. Beyond that, if this study has value in bringing together several of the pertinent varieties of historical discourse into a viable synthesis, it will have fulfilled its aims.

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Acknowledgements The project draws much of its methodological inspiration from my many years’ affiliation with the Records of Early English Drama project. It benefits more recently from my role as an advisor to the Making Art in Tudor Britain project at the National Portrait Gallery, and from the curators, conservators, and researchers associated with it. Though the work at hand approaches the subject from a different perspective and sometimes reaches some contrary conclusions, it is nevertheless indebted to the following project members and associates who patiently offered their time and expertise: Charlotte Bolland, Aviva Burnstock, Tarnya Cooper, Catherine Daunt, Maurice Howard, Catharine MacLeod, Sally Marriott, Sophie Plender, Polly Saltmarsh, Edward Town, and Ian Tyers. Amongst others of the art historical community who have lent valuable insights and encouragement, Katie Coombs, Jane Eade, Elizabeth Goldring, Karen Hearn, Tessa Murdoch, and Hope Walker should be singled out, as should Robin Simon for his willingness to publish my unconventional essays in The British Art Journal. A historian of England based in Quebec has little access to the common room chatter of British colleagues, so that the more formal occasions to engage with others through guest lectures and seminar presentations become essential. For such valuable opportunities I am both delighted and honoured to thank Catherine Richardson at the University of Kent at Canterbury, along with the conveners of the Annual Research Seminars of the National Portrait Gallery; the Annual Lecture Series of Chester’s Grosvenor Museum; the lecture series of The City Museum, Gloucester; the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sheffield; the Humanities Seminar the University of Michigan; the Department of History at Oberlin College; both the Early Modern Economic and Social History Seminar and the Local and Provincial History Seminar at London’s Institute of Historical Research; and the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium. In addition, programme chairs of the Northeast Conference on British Studies and the North American Conference on British Studies have kindly allowed me to air bits and pieces of what follows in their respective forums. Dr Catherine Crawford and Professor Alan Nelson in turn most graciously solved the non-resident’s eternal problem of where to stay in London. For smoothing the publication process, I thank Michael Middeke and Elizabeth Howard of Boydell and Brewer, series editors Andy Wood, Stephen Taylor, and Tim Harris, and the anonymous outside reader who commented on the initial submission. Amongst the many archivists who have lent a hand well beyond the call of duty the following must especially be thanked: Adrian Ailes (The National Archives/Bristol University), Paul Cox (The Heinz Archive of the National Portrait Gallery), Lynsey Darby (College of Arms), and Christopher Thompson xii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

(Tate Britain), along with staffs at The Chester Archives and Local Studies, The Guildhall Library, The National Archives, The British Library, The Institute of Historical Research, The London Metropolitan Archives, The Society of Antiquaries, and the myriad additional local and country record offices in which I have worked through these years and which will be identified in the Bibliography. In addition, I thank those many scholars who have contributed data to the Early Modern British Painters database which forms the principal foundation for this work: John Adamson (Peterhouse, Cambridge), Malcolm Airs (Kellogg College, Oxford), Michael Berlin (Birkbeck College), Christine Braybrooke, Cheryl Butler (Eastleigh Borough Council, Southampton), Justin Colson (Essex University), Tarnya Cooper (National Trust), Lindsey Cox (Hamilton Kerr Institute, Cambridge), Kathryn Davies (independent scholar), Shaun Evans (National Museum of Wales), Liz Feraggi, Jemma Field (Yale), Michael Fleming, Mark Girouard (independent scholar), Helen Good (University of Hull), Peter Greenfield (University of Puget Sound), Felicity Heal (Oxford University), Frederick Hepburn (independent scholar), Tracey Hill (Bath Spa University), Lucy Hughes (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), Jennifer Jackson, Gary Jenkins (Birkbeck College), Alexandra F. Johnston (University of Toronto), Krista Kesselring (Dalhousie University), Andrea Kirkham (independent scholar), Rachel Koopmans (York University), James Lawson (Shrewsbury School), John J. McGavin (University of Southampton), Sally-Beth Maclean (University of Toronto), Sara McMahon (independent scholar), Mark Merry (Institute of Historical Research, London University), Catherine Morrison, Alan H. Nelson (University of California, Berkeley), Raewyn Passmore (Canadian Currency Museum), Colin Phillips (University of Manchester), Suzanne Phillips (University of Buckingham), Carole Rawcliffe (University of East Anglia), Edward Town (Yale), Susan Wabuda (Fordham University), Hope Walker (Western Governors’ University), Helen E. Wicker (University of Kent, Canterbury), and Lucy Wrapson (University of East Anglia). The final stages of the work continued during the lockdown conditions of 2020–21 which precluded normal access to my campus research office and university library. Under those circumstances the support of Luigina Vileno and her staff at Concordia’s Vanier Library, and of Faye Corbin and her staff at Concordia’s inter-library loan office, proved even more invaluable than usual. Finally, I am grateful to the successive incumbents in the Office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University for allowing me the use of a post-retirement research office in which to work.

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Editorial Conventions and Abbreviations In order to place painters in their appropriate time frame, the first mention of each painter’s name will be followed by their dates in parentheses when those dates are known. London is the place of publication for all works unless specified otherwise. BL British Library EMBP Early Modern British Painters: http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/ 980096 (September, 2019 edition) LGL London Guildhall Library LMA London Metropolitan Archives ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography TNA The National Archives

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Part I Introduction

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Introduction: Priming the Canvas Given the numerous major gallery exhibits of recent years and the scholarship which has supported or been inspired by them, one’s first response to the notion of painting in Tudor and early Stuart England is to think especially of its portraiture, and of the artists who produced it.1 In both art historical scholarship and the public imagination, that subject has often been construed in the Tudor era as a journey from Holbein to Hilliard, and under the early Stuarts as culminating in the work of Rubens and Van Dyck. These time-honoured approaches have enormous value, and there is little to be gained by denying their rightful place in the art history of the nation. But there remains another, less often recognized, dimension to this familiar story. It lies in the political, social, and economic contexts in which contemporary painters lived and worked, and thus in the painters’ occupation itself in these same years. Few painters, either then or now, rose to the status of celebrities or to what we would recognize as artists, but even Holbein and Hilliard, Rubens and Van Dyck, were nevertheless still painters. Along with the many, far lesser practitioners of their craft, they drew upon a common denominator of activities, practices, and concerns, and none of them remained unaffected, in their lives or their work, by the world around them. In short, though they may have varied widely in their fame and fortunes, all those who painted for a living in this era found their place on the same occupational continuum. Unless they had someone to do it for them, every one of them will have had, for example, to mix their paints, prime their surfaces, clean their brushes, and pay their rent. 1 This parade may be said to have begun with Karen Hearn’s ground-breaking 1995 exhibition Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630 held at Tate Britain. Along the way it has included National Maritime Museum’s 2003 exhibit on Elizabeth, curated by David Starkey and Tarnya Cooper, and with a catalogue edited by Susan Doran. Susan Foister followed her Holbein and England of 2005 with her Holbein in England at Tate Britain in 2006, and in that same year Cooper’s Searching for Shakespeare appeared at the National Portrait Gallery, with her edition of the catalogue of the same title. In 2009 David Starkey’s Henry VIII: Man and Monarch, with a catalogue by Doran, ran at the British Library along with Hearn’s Van Dyck and Britain at Tate Britain. The National Portrait Gallery’s major collaborative research project entitled ‘Making Art in Tudor Britain’ (2007, ff.) resulted, inter alia, in a major exhibition in 2010 and four books: Cooper’s Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elites of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales 1540–1620 (2012), her Elizabeth I and her People (2013) and The Real Tudors: Kings and Queens Re-discovered (with Charlotte Bolland, 2014); and a huge compendium of essays entitled Painting in Britain 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage, edited by Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard and Edward Town (2015). Finally, at least to this point, Elizabeth Goldring’s Nicholas Hilliard, Life of an Artist came forth in 2019.

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PAINTING FOR A LIVING

This is a study of those who, whether ‘artists’ or not, painted for a living in Tudor and early Stuart England. Though it draws at times from art historical and curatorial scholarship, much of its perspective emerges from the political, religious, social, and economic history of that era. It draws as well from a comprehensive biographical database of some 2,800 people – strangers and native English, Londoners and provincial townsmen, men and sometimes women, celebrity artists and ‘mere painters’, and practitioners of every corner of the craft – who painted one thing or another and did so for a living in that time and place.2 Such an approach requires the casual reader to make some mental adjustments: to move further beyond the canonical parade of celebrity artists which, even amongst curators and art historians, begins to fade from the common view; further from the equation of painting as necessarily constituting art; and further as well from the concentration, to the exclusion of much else, on the portraits of that era which we most often see on the gallery walls. Such adjustments have their challenges. When we think of those painters, we think of artists, though that may be a presentist and anachronistic approach. For one, it assumes that what we mean by the term ‘artist’ is what people at that time meant by it, when (at least in England) they were only, in the latter years of this era, first coming to do so. The more common use of the term was merely to denote someone who bore some skill in a particular craft, but without the personal celebrity, and without the imaginative dimension or technical refinement, which we take to be essential components of art. The careers of Holbein and Hilliard, Rubens and Van Dyck, surely have a lot to tell us about the painters’ occupation in this era, but perhaps no more so than the likes of, for example, Nicholas Lyzard, Rowland Buckett, Randle Holme the elder, or Henry Lilly. Yet while the former quartet grace the pages of any conventional art history just as their works grace the gallery walls, the latter quartet remain largely unfamiliar to us. In the sister discipline of architecture, analogous distinctions were famously captured in Niklaus Pevsner’s oft-quoted quip that ‘A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture. Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.’3 By the same token, we can only speak of a painting as a work of art when it became valued more for that same aesthetic appeal, and for its authorship, than for the mere depiction of its subject. Only then can we say that its creator had emerged from the general run of painters to the status of an artist. Until the last decades of the Tudor and early Stuart era, that notion rarely applied. Most who painted would, if they had been joiners and there had been bicycles, have 2

Robert Tittler, Early Modern British Painters, 1500–1640, http://spectrum.library. concordia. ca/980096 (hereafter EMBP). 3 Niklaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture (Harmondsworth, [1942] 1957), p. 23.

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INTRODUCTION: PRIMING THE CANVAS

been building bicycle sheds. Indeed, it is that emergence of the celebrity painter as ‘artist’ which marks one of the salient features of the painter’s occupation towards the end of the era before us. Something of a rough and ready line of demarcation between the two concepts may perhaps be found in that point when a painting became known, and coveted, for the name of its author as well as for its subject. That point had surely been reached by the time Charles I bargained for the art collection of the Gonzagas of Mantua. But its roots, and the concept of connoisseurship which it embraced, did not extend back much before the mid-Elizabethan years. The few lists of paintings which have survived from this era, in such documents as inventories post mortem, identify works by their subject but almost never by their painter. Second, when we think of painters in Tudor and early Stuart England we most readily think of those who painted portraits and other figurative works. In fact, most such painters painted all sorts of things, and portraiture was not necessarily the most widely practised genre. Even those whom we think of as portrait painters usually worked in other genres as well. With only a few exceptions, most of the specializations which we now take for granted were only at this time emerging from the more general range of skills which most painters still possessed and employed in their work. Those whom we know of as arms painters and decorative painters also could and sometimes did paint portraits. Some painters carved, or gilded, or stained cloth. Glass painters painted arms and decorative work as well as portraits. We know of Robert Peake as one of the foremost native English portrait painters of the Elizabethan era, but he also held royal commissions for the painting of ships. He shared that commission with Jan de Critz, whom we also know mostly through his portraits. Holbein, as we know, could do almost anything. But though they may have lacked his skill or imagination, many of Holbein’s contemporaries enjoyed a similar versatility, and served as ‘general practitioners’ of the craft. And third, we also still think of those who painted in these years as working and living in the great London metropolis. It was not many years ago when a widely distributed, popular introduction to the history of English painting could pronounce that ‘…the local centres of art having vanished [after the English Reformation], the tendency of painting to be centralized in London and the services of the court was affirmed’, and ‘the habit grew of using foreign painters’.4 Few provincial painters had by that time been identified, and one easily inferred that there were but few to be found. Though such a statement may have been correct to see the Reformation as a key turning point in the history of the occupation, it widely missed the mark (as numerous others have by now realized) in other respects: for example, by denying the wide distribution of painters elsewhere in the realm, and by implying that foreign painters were new to the scene at that time.

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William Gaunt, A Concise History of English Painting (New York, 1964).

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This is neither another institutional history of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, which has been well done by others,5 or another investigation of the technical intricacies of the craft which has been so thoroughly probed in curatorial and art historical scholarship. Nor is it a study of artists in our sense of the term, or of what we think of as art. It reaches beyond the mere production of portraiture and on to all forms of painting. It is very much a study of how painters responded, in both their work and in their lives, to the greater ambient currents of their time. Those men and sometimes women who painted for a living were also cognizant, some of them very keenly cognizant indeed, of the events surrounding them as they went about their business and plied their craft. Their success depended as much on their reading of the climate of their times as did the farmers’ reading of the weather. As the Tudor and early Stuart era saw great and constant change in social and economic life, religion, governance, and foreign relations, so did these forces shape the pursuit of particular occupations, few as profoundly as the painters’. The very viability of the occupation depended on how it adapted to change. The ways in which it did or did not do so determined the course of its development. A long-range, ‘aerial view’ of the occupation might well begin with the world of late medieval Roman Catholicism in which the Tudors came to power, and in which painters plied their trade as they had done through the generations. Amply supported especially by ecclesiastical patronage, decorative painters, including those who painted on glass, ruled the roost. Stainers – those who painted on cloth – also maintained a viable presence. Portraiture consisted largely of generic representations of religious figures, while secular easel portraiture appeared almost entirely – and even then, sparsely – within courtly circles. The dramatic changes of the 1530s and 1540s turned this world upside down, and the painters’ craft turned with it. By the time of the death of Edward VI in 1553 the onslaught on the rich and ubiquitous imagery of late medieval Catholic worship was well underway, and with it the disappearance of what was perhaps the single most lucrative source of the painters’ traditional patronage. Over time, that source would be replaced in part by the more restrained imagery of protestant worship. Painters briefly employed merely to whitewash church walls were soon brought back to letter the Ten Commandments and to paint the royal arms over the rood beam where the rood itself had long stood. By the end of the Elizabethan era the Settlement of Religion had nearly driven glass painters entirely off the stage, and reduced staining, much of it formerly devoted to religious imagery, to a very minor craft. The same shifts in the firmament led decorative painters to find their employment in secular

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W.A.D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1923) and Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005).

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households more than in its accustomed ecclesiastical settings.6 The intensifying social competition of the same era also made heraldry and the painting of arms more important than ever. That same social dynamic brought the production of free-standing, easel portraiture into its own, first for the Crown, and then for descending ranks of landed and professional people through the remainder of the era, so that a virtual public for secular portraiture may be said to have emerged by century’s end.7 The continental Reformation intruded on the English painters’ world almost as much as the home-grown variety. The division over the course of the sixteenth century between Catholic and protestant Europe not only created deep and enduring conflicts in international relations, but it accentuated the distance between cisalpine and transalpine approaches to painting. England’s post-Reformation affinity with the increasingly protestant north, and its long estrangement, especially under Elizabeth, from the Roman Catholic south, shaped its traditions of painting just as much as its politics. And when the religious wars of the mid-century and after drove many Dutch, French, and Flemish refugees to England, English painters faced a newly substantial presence in their working lives. Stranger-painters had been welcomed formally at court and informally elsewhere from well back before Tudor times, but now they came in greater numbers. They brought with them a more distinctive and classically informed approach to their work, and they settled more permanently in London and elsewhere than ever before. Their presence proved both threatening and stimulating to native English painters. The succession of the Stuart monarchy opened yet another chapter in the history of the occupation. Both Jacobean and Caroline courts took a more tolerant approach to the Catholic powers of the day and to more traditional forms of worship. Along with the foreign-born and culturally refined queens Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria of France, Charles in particular joined with the courtiers of the day in their appreciation of continental painting, while the influence of churchmen like William Laud brought an ornate imagery back to the English church. These deep tidal currents proved especially challenging for the painters’ trade. Some native English painters, especially in London, had the means, courage, skill, and ambition to assimilate the new fashions in their work. Others, including most members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of that same metropolis, attempted to deny and restrict the newcomers’ efforts. In the end, that latter strategy encouraged an enduring bifurcation in the ranks of the occupation. By 1640 the artist and the celebrity painter had arrived, but so, at 6 Though, as Tara Hamling has so brilliantly demonstrated, it did not necessarily abandon religious imagery as it did so. Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (London and New Haven, 2011). 7 The emergence of such a public is pursued in Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), especially Chapter 3.

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the other extreme of the occupational spectrum, had the semi-skilled proletarian artisan who scrambled to find work whenever and wherever he could. In short, the era marked at one end by the accession of Henry VII and at the other by the onset of the Civil Wars proved enormously malleable for one of England’s ancient crafts. Over that long durée, the painters’ métier both reflected and facilitated the salient developments of the era. An appreciation of that occupation, and of its evolution over time, offers a critically important perspective on the development of English visual culture and of English society itself. This, then, is a study of painters in the broadest sense: who they were, how they made their living, and where and under what circumstances they did so. It considers how and why their occupation changed over the course of this protean era. It strives to embrace the full range of that occupation, and it does so in provincial as well as metropolitan England. It considers the foreign-born painters who proved so crucial to the development of painting in England, as well as their native-born counterparts. And it considers the place of women as well as men in the painters’ trade. Beyond all that, it may additionally suggest an unusual and useful perspective on the history of England itself in those years. How, then, to proceed? Pre-Reformation English men and women lived in a colourful and highly decorative built environment, one in which painters had long been, and continued to be, hard at work. The following chapter offers a closer, benchmark survey of the occupation in the opening years of Tudor rule, and of the variety of work embraced by that calling. The ensuing three chapters consider some of the kinds of people who painted for a living, and the relations between and amongst them: strangers and native English, Londoners (in the form of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of that City), and provincial painters. The opening years of the era saw native English painters comprising the bulk of the occupation, but some stranger-painters had always come to England and many still did so. Some were recruited by the Crown and senior aristocracy to provide the specialized skills which native English painters could not yet supply. Other strangers came, and had long come, casually to seek decorative work especially in the churches of the more affluent regions of the realm. By the 1540s the presence of strangers in general had become so emphatic, so influential, and so apparently threatening to the security of the nation at a time of impending war, as to warrant a more concerted government response. Chapter 2 takes up the presence of the stranger-painters in the context of English foreign and religious policy. We follow their arrival and activities, first largely as economic migrants in the 1540s, then as religious refugees after the religious wars of the 1560s, and finally at the peak of their popularity under James I and Charles I. They settled more thickly in London than elsewhere, where (as we’ll see in Chapter 3) their reception by the native English community in general and by English painters in particular is best followed in the activities of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London. But lest we perpetuate the impression 8

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INTRODUCTION: PRIMING THE CANVAS

that English painting was pretty much a London affair, Chapter 4 demonstrates the role and fortunes of painters in provincial England, and especially in the particularly well-documented city of Chester. Here again the 1540s mark a point of demarcation: the beginning of a flow of working painters away from small towns and villages and towards the larger urban centres. These discussions treat the general run of painters: those who, whether strangers or natives, Londoners or not, might and probably did practise almost any form of painting they were asked to do. But two occupational specialities remained in these years particularly distinctive; each of them emphatically influenced by the contexts of their times; each of them frequently overlooked in the mainstream of modern scholarship. Especially over the last two-thirds of the era at hand the intensification of social competition amongst the landed and professional classes, and the search for the visual symbols of elevated social status, created a greater demand for heraldic recognition, and for the painting of arms, than ever before. Arms painting, and those who practised that craft, thus becomes the subject of Chapter 5. A painter-of-all-work could and often did benefit from this armigerous turn, but not all painting skills were as readily mastered or as positively influenced by the tenor of the times. Glass painting offers a second particular and equally overlooked speciality. In contrast to arms painting, it was not even at the best of times something which most painters could learn casually to do. But it, too, proved especially susceptible to the currents of social and (especially) religious change. Perhaps the least familiar corner of the painters’ occupation, its peculiar rhythm of rise, fall, and rise again requires a chapter of its own. Whatever a painter’s speciality or prominence, the ways and means by which he, or sometimes she, worked depended on the personnel and spatial configuration of the workshop. We may think of a workshop as consisting either of a group of people or as a physical space. Each sense of the term deserves its own place in the discussion. Chapter 7 considers the workshop as a group of people organized hierarchically and engaged in a common pursuit. Along with the master, its division of labour could also include a spouse, apprentices, journeymen, secondary masters, and any number of informal hangers on. These roles bring us to consider the organization and mobility of labour within the painters’ occupation as well as within the wider Early Modern economy. And, of course, that collectivity of people will have occupied that physical space to which the word ‘workshop’ also applies. The nature and organization of that space will form the subject of Chapter 8. Finally, we must ask how the painter made a living: what sort of arrangements pertained to the business of making it, and what sort of living he or she may have made in its pursuit. Chapter 9 takes up the business of painting, and concludes by considering the possibilities of a painter’s status in the community. A final chapter will try and assess the meaning of it all: the significance of this peculiarly dynamic era in the long history of the painters’ occupation, and the role of that occupation in its ambient society. 9

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1 Painters before the Reformation In pre-Reformation England men and women throughout the realm lived in a richly coloured environment. Painted works of one sort or another were simply ubiquitous, but not necessarily in the forms or locations which their Elizabethan grandchildren would find familiar. Much of that work, and especially in the ecclesiastical settings of late medieval Catholic worship, will have taken the form of decorative painting. The building and decoration of the great country houses one associates with the Elizabethan and Jacobean years, many of them renovated or built on the bones of dissolved monastic houses, still lay well over time’s horizon. A great deal of controversy has surrounded efforts to date the great ‘rebuilding of rural England’ which, amongst its other characteristics, put a great many painters to work in the residences of the nation, but few have seen that phenomenon beginning in the early years of Tudor rule.1 The production of portraiture, always front and centre in studies of Tudor painting, bore a very different and smaller profile in the early years of that dynasty. Most early painted, as opposed to sculpted, portraits appeared on walls or wood panelling, sometimes on glass, and mostly in ecclesiastical settings. Generic rood screen depictions of biblical figures, saints, and ancient kings were standard fare in many a parish church. Royal portraiture long pre-dated the Tudors, but rarely in the form of easel paintings. Tomb effigies of both Henry II and Richard I are amongst the few earliest surviving English portraits, whilst a now-lost painting of Henry III and Queen Charlotte, done in 1293, was probably a wall painting. A wall painting of Edward III done in 1363 at St Stephen’s Chapel, Westminster, also survives, whilst the portrait of Richard II appears on the Wilton Diptych.2 It also seems likely that during or shortly after their lifetimes some English monarchs were portrayed outside London and the court. An intriguing reference in an account roll of the Gild Merchant of Reading, Berkshire, records the payment of 12d. to an unnamed painter for ‘a picture of the King for the Guildhall’.3 Late fifteenth-century painters frequently engaged in media which have tended to escape the close scrutiny of modern art historical investigation. Wall 1 The concept originated with W.G. Hoskins’s seminal essay, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England 1570–1640’, Past and Present, 4 (1953), 44–59. The controversy and revisions which followed in its wake are aptly summarized in Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England (1994), Chap. 1. 2 Frederick Hepburn, The Portraits of the Later Plantagenets (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 3–7. 3 Cecil Slade (ed.), Reading Gild Accounts, 1357–1516, Berkshire Record Society (2 vols, 2002), I, p. 169.

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PAINTERS BEFORE THE REFORMATION

paintings, for example, some of them quite crude and many of them entirely vernacular, probably did not hit their peak until the mid-sixteenth century, but earlier examples were geographically ubiquitous and frequently both imaginative and multi-coloured. Those in residential and civic venues have more often survived iconoclastic destruction for our discovery and examination, but it was the parish churches of the realm which will have hosted their most prolific and magnificent display. The same may be said for glass painting, a medium which includes portraits along with other genres. Like wall painting, its penumbral place in mainstream art historical scholarship may stem from the poor survival rate of examples which could be studied. Then too, those who painted on glass have usually been counted as part of the glazier’s trade rather than the painter’s, and so have been omitted from studies of painting. Yet the glaziers who worked in the production, cutting, and construction of glass were not necessarily the same people, and did not necessarily bear the same skills, as those who painted upon it (nor were glasspainters necessarily involved in the production, cutting, and construction of the glass on which they painted). Glass-painting may be considered a particular speciality within the painters’ trade and, as we will see, its affinity with the painters rather than the glaziers merely grew steadily in the years at hand.4 Arms painting has also tended to slip through the canonical net. Though heralds, as members of the College of Arms, had at least to be able to sketch armorial designs, they often employed or even deputized painters to do the final painting. Heraldic imagery had taken a prominent place in secular contexts well before the Tudor accession. It proceeded to enjoy a massive proliferation through the upper and middling ranks of society in the century thereafter. At a time of increasing social mobility and intense scrambling for social recognition, armigerous status proclaimed by the display of arms, whether legitimate or contrived, became a more coveted attainment than ever. Coats of arms and associated heraldic elements appeared on all sorts of surfaces and objects. They came to adorn the halls and furnishings, ships, horses, and livery of the Crown and aristocracy. They eventually became a common feature of easel portraits and funeral monuments, where they marked the social attainments of the aspiring gentry, merchants, civic officials, and all others who coveted armigerous standing. Stainers, those who applied paint or dyes to cloth, leather, or similar soft materials, had operated as their own craft prior to the sixteenth century, but were already in slow decline by that time. John Stow may not have been entirely correct in stating ‘… that workmanship of stayning is departed out of use in England’ by the opening of the seventeenth century,5 but we might excuse him for thinking so. It had by then declined dramatically in importance and 4

Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (1993), p. 58. John Stow, A Survey of London Reprinted from the Text of 1603, ed. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (2 vols, Oxford, 1908, with additional notes, 1927), II, pp. 3–4. 5

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its practitioners had largely been subsumed into the broader occupational category of painting itself. The descriptive term ‘painter-stainer’ had long been in common usage, and in London, Newcastle, and no doubt elsewhere guilds embracing both crafts had merged into a single organization by the opening of the sixteenth century. In London the two traditional liveries of Painters and Stainers merged into the Painter-Stainers’ Company in 1502, with the Painters rapidly becoming the dominant element.6 The limners (‘illuminatores’) of pre-Reformation times might also be considered to have painted, though they did so in very particular ways and, in contrast to most others who painted, they mostly did so on parchment and paper. As far back as 1357 limners had been grouped by the London Court of Aldermen with Text Writers (later called Scriveners), and both crafts engaged in the book trades. The linkage made sense. Limners were primarily illustrators of books or illuminators of manuscripts, but had also, at earlier times, been active in binding and selling books, and in producing and selling individually illustrated sheets.7 Their work survives in myriad illuminated manuscripts, and in the form of drawings and illuminations on legal and diplomatic documents emanating from the Crown or royal courts: for example, the plea rolls of the Courts of King’s Bench and Common Pleas,8 and diplomatic letters intended for foreign heads of state.9 The latter images appear to have been drawn by what Elizabeth Danbury has termed the clerk-illuminators working within the courts whose work they illustrated. They would therefore have mostly been native English craftsmen, but they employed motifs which appeared in the continental as well as in the native English vocabulary of drawing and illumination. These may

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W.A.D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1923), pp. 46–8; Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005) (hereafter Borg, Painter-Stainers), p. 4. 7 Peter W.M. Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (2 vols, Cambridge, 2013), pp. 2–6. 8 Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VIII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954) (hereafter Auerbach, Tudor Artists). See also Public Record Office, Royal Portraits from the Plea Rolls, Henry VIII to Charles II (1974); Elizabeth Danbury, ‘The Decoration and Illumination of Royal Charters in England, 1250–1509: An Introduction’, in England and her Neighbours, 1066–1453: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (1989), pp. 157–80; and Elizabeth Danbury and K.L. Scott, ‘The Plea Rolls of the Court of Common Pleas: An Unused Source for the Art and History of Later Medieval England: 1422–1509’, Antiquaries Journal, 95 (2015), 157–210. 9 Elizabeth Danbury, ‘England and French Artistic Propaganda during the Period of the Hundred Years’ War: Some Evidence from Royal Charters’, in Power, Culture and Religion in France, c.1350–1550, ed. Christopher Allmand (Woodbridge, 1989), pp. 75–97; Maija Jansson, Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East (Leiden and Boston, 2015).

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have derived from the corpus of alphabet books which were then in circulation10 or, more directly, from English contacts with the occasional foreign scribe or limner travelling in England. By the Elizabethan era, limners still specialized in illustration and illumination but they found their place amongst the calligraphers and scriveners rather than the painters. The most common application of the term had come instead to refer to those who painted portrait miniatures. Numerous members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London were also known as limners. Even at the very top of the profession, men like Nicholas Hilliard worked as a painter and limner, producing the miniatures for which he is best known. Though relatively few limners will have worked outside the London metropolis, most other forms of late medieval painting will also have been widely practised in provincial England. Glass painting will even have been concentrated more in cities like York and Norwich than in London. Norwich records turn up as many as thirty-five named glass painters in the latter two-thirds of the fifteenth century.11 Many of the distinctions between metropolitan and provincial painters will have been matters of emphasis and degree. Painters in both venues all occupied places on the same occupational continuum. Yet as we’ll see in greater detail in Chapter 4, geographic factors mattered. The population density of a painter’s residential community or of its hinterland, his or her proximity either to metropolitan London or to trade routes either internal or overseas, the regulatory restrictions of the local community, and the local and regional adaptations to religious change, all helped shape a painter’s activities in years to come. In London and most of the larger urban centres of the realm, much of an English painter’s working life also fell under the jurisdiction of a guild specific to that craft, or – in the absence of such guilds – of the general freemanry of the community. Along with redemption by fee and by patrimony, successful apprenticeship to a master as determined by the authority of the guild served as one of the three normative routes to a freeman’s status. That status brought the right to participate fully in the local economy. Prior to the Reformation, many such guilds served additionally as, or were closely tied to, religious fraternities, so that membership had both its economic and religious implications. London’s painters operated in their own guild at least from the latter thirteenth century, though formal recognition came in several subsequent stages thereafter.12 Painters in some other communities will also have formed into dedicated guilds, or will at least have operated within the general freemanry. But not all those who painted for a living were guildsmen. Some particularly rural communities were too small to have guilds or a formal freemanry. Itinerant painters also 10

Danbury and Scott, ‘Plea Rolls of the Court of Common Pleas’, 186–92. Stained Glass in England, pp. 41 and 195. 12 Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 33; City of London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix (4 vols, 1883), III, pp. 615–16. 11 Marks,

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worked outside such structures. And strangers, to employ the contemporary term for those born abroad, were also often itinerants, and were commonly barred from employment in most civic jurisdictions. Whether in London or elsewhere, the presence of foreign-born strangerpainters forms a constant leitmotif to late medieval English visual culture. Especially in the fifteenth century, the expansion of parish church construction and decoration created a demand for appropriately skilled craftsmen which frequently exceeded the local supply of talent. The lingering shortage in England of highly skilled labour in the decades following the Black Death (c. 1348–51) offered rich employment opportunities for foreign glass painters, panel painters, illuminators, gilders, and other craftsmen. In a pattern which would long endure, they brought with them their prints and pattern books and their training in the workshops of continental masters. They slowly and casually disseminated stylistic concepts and working techniques originating in Italy and other centres of cultural refinement. The stranger-painters were of course most densely concentrated in London and at court. Their myriad skills, along with the cultural panache implied by their presence, had readily caught the eye of kings like Edward IV and Henry VII during their respective years of foreign exile. Anxious to bring back with them to England some of that cultural refinement on their own succession, both of them collected illuminated manuscripts and books produced in continental, especially Flemish, workshops, and commissioned copies of such works. Henry VII even appointed the French scribe and printer Quenton Poulet as his first Royal Librarian, thus perpetuating continental experience at court and establishing a link with others of the French book trade.13 In the same period, as we’ll see in greater detail in the following chapter, both the Crown and senior aristocracy on the one hand and foreign merchant communities in London and Southampton on the other brought in numerous painters and other artisans from both cisalpine and transalpine Europe. Henry VII’s predilection for Italian and French painters to staff his sundry building projects and supply his still modest requirements for manuscript illumination and portraiture opened the doors more widely than ever to royal patronage. In his early years Henry VIII continued in the same vein by employing sundry French and Italian craftsmen as well as some talented Flemings. Though that warm royal (as opposed to popular) reception of particular stranger-craftsmen grew a good deal frostier in and after the 1540s, it left an indelible imprint. The link which it provided between native English and continental approaches to the craft proved both enduring and enormously consequential.

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Janet Backhouse, ‘Founders of the Royal Library: Edward IV and Henry VII as Collectors of Illuminated Manuscripts’, in England in the Fifteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1986 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Daniel Williams (Woodbridge, 1987), pp. 23–41; Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, pp. 71, 111–12.

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In addition to their presence in London and at court, foreign painters had long established footholds in provincial England. East Anglian parish churches, amongst others, are dotted with such handiwork extending back to the fifteenth century and even before. Audrey Baker has detected Italian influence in the depiction of animal forms in the splendid fourteenth-century screen work at Ranworth in Norfolk. They seem to have been modelled on the pattern of Lucchese silks, though they may have appeared on intermediate forms and in other places by the time they reached Norfolk.14 Tile patterns in the Ranworth floor derive from those laid out in French manuscript illuminations of the early fourteenth century. Rhinelandish influence has been observed in the decorated screen at Houghton St Giles, as well as in a painting of The Resurrection commissioned for the Norwich parish church of St Michael at Plea and eventually relocated to Norwich Cathedral.15 Rood screens, several hundred of which survive in East Anglian churches alone,16 offer particularly rich evidence of late medieval craftsmanship of both continental and native English provenance. The wealthy regional merchants and landed gentry of pre-Reformation Norfolk and Suffolk energetically patronized ecclesiastical causes, allowing their parish churches to become amongst the largest and most elaborately decorated and furnished in all of England. More than almost anyone else outside London, East Anglians, and especially those involved in the wool trade, had been intimately engaged with their Northern European counterparts from time out of mind. Trade and travel between the two coasts had long been widespread and frequent. That interchange brought long-standing and frequent contact with the visual culture of Dutch, Flemish, and German workshops, and served as a source of admiration and imitation. It allowed English merchants and their gentry neighbours to commission painted work of various kinds, eventually including portraiture as well, and to bring it back to England. By about 1500 painting on some East Anglian rood screens began to replace the more laconic, typically native English, presentation of standing figures of saints or kings with the more narrative scenes characteristic of contemporary Dutch and Flemish work. Stylistic markers survive to document early examples 14

Audrey Baker, English Panel Paintings, 1400–1558: A Survey of Figure Paintings in East Anglian Rood Screens (2011), p. 12. 15 Ibid., p. 14. 16 Classic treatments include Francis Bond, Screens and Galleries in English Churches (1908), F.B. Bond and Dom Camm Bede, Roodscreens and Rood Lofts (2 vols, 1909), and Aymer Vallance, English Church Screens (1936). In addition to Baker’s English Panel Paintings, noteworthy modern studies include S. Cotton, ‘Medieval Roodscreens in Norfolk: Their Construction and Painting’, Norfolk Archaeology, 40:1 (1987), 44–54; and Lucy Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context for the Artistic Production of Painted Surfaces in England: Evidence from East Anglia, c.1400–1540’, in Painting in Britain 1500–1630, ed. Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard, and Edward Town (hereafter Cooper et al., Painting in Britain) (Oxford, 2015), pp. 195–203.

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of foreigners’ work elsewhere as well. They may be seen, for example, in the windows of Winchester College, done at the end of the fourteenth century, in the ante-chapel of All Souls College done in 1441,17 and in wall paintings on the lower walls of Eton College Chapel where two Flemish artists decorated en grisaille in the 1480s. Some of those foreigners came and went; others settled in. They did so at court and in London, but elsewhere as well. We know that an unnamed Dutch or German painter settled not in London but in Leicester, where he had joined a community of Lollards by 1511.18 At the accession of the Tudor dynasty both the variety and extent of these traditional painterly activities suggest an occupation on a secure footing. Native English traditions of craftsmanship in painting as in many associated trades were deeply rooted and well-supported by courtly and non-courtly patrons alike, both in London and widely elsewhere. And when, as was sometimes the case, neither the supply nor the skills of native English painters in general quite sufficed to serve the increasingly refined requirements of the court and more affluent laity, stranger-craftsmen could be recruited to fill the void. As is well known, anti-immigrant sentiment, dramatically bursting into violence in the Evil May Day riots of 1517, may accurately have represented the sentiments of the general population which feared economic competition. Yet skilled strangerpainters were still welcomed at court while their more occasional and ephemeral presence in most of provincial England proved less threatening. By the Elizabethan era, those who painted for a living operated in a world of rapid population growth, accumulated capital from agricultural production, and large-scale investment in the building or conversion of country houses, all of which ambient developments opened myriad new opportunities for all sorts of decorative painting. One such salient development saw the replacement of the open hearth in rural houses by a central chimney stack which channelled the smoke up and out of the living space and freed decorative surfaces from the constant accumulation of soot. Another saw the wider proliferation of glass windows which were no longer occluded by smoke so that they let in more light. Along with the development of the upstairs chambers and long galleries, such architectural innovations encouraged the proliferation of paintings and other decorative touches in the domestic interior.19 Driven by the urge to display their social status, the better and even the middling sorts of people could now 17 Baker,

English Panel Paintings, p. 14. Staffordshire Record Office, ‘The Courtbook of Bishop Geoffrey Blyth of Coventry and Lichfield, 1511–1512’, MS B/C/13, fol. 7r. I owe this reference to Professor Shannon McSheffrey. 19 Succinctly stated in Malcolm Airs, ‘Architecture, Politics, and Society’, in A Companion to Tudor Britain, ed. Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (Oxford, 2004), pp. 484–6 and more broadly in, e.g., Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: An Architectural History (1995); Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680 (1999); Mark Girouard, Life in the 18

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proceed to commission more painting for indoor display. The appeal of family portraits in particular extended well beyond the court circle and aristocracy, so that a viable and wider public for secular portraiture may be said to have arrived by the mid-Elizabethan years. Spurred by the same social imperatives, arms painting became such a big business as to invite frequent corruption, more stringent regulation, and conflict at the highest levels over access to its production. Over the course of time the parish church, stripped in mid-century and after of much of its traditional imagery, came to feature the royal arms, usually facing the nave and looming over the congregation as, from the same commanding perch, the rood had long done. The Ten Commandments and other scriptural passages came commonly to be painted along, in many communities, with those post-Reformation communion tables which had replaced traditional altars. Until fashion dictated a return to the natural appearance of stone in the seventeenth century, tombs were often painted,20 whilst imagery of a more secular nature continued to appear as well. At one time or another, depending on the formal restrictions and local persuasions of the day and in one church or another, pews, choir stalls, rood screens and rood lofts, baptismal fonts, pulpits, images of biblical figures and saints, roofs and roof bosses, and almost every structural part of the church itself right up, in some instances, to the steeple, vane, and weathercock, will have been painted. Those who painted for a living in this protean era were constantly preoccupied by several key tensions in their midst: between stranger-painters and native English; between pre- and post-Reformation concepts of visual culture; between the interests of painters and of rival occupations; and between guildsmen and interlopers. The following section explores each of these dichotomous relationships. It begins in Chapter 2 with a consideration of the stranger-painters, and then moves in Chapter 3 to consider the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, and then in Chapter 4 to painters in provincial England.

English Country House (1978), Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (1983), and Elizabethan Architecture, its Rise and Fall (London and New Haven, 2009). 20 Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000), p. 227.

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Part II Kinds of People

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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2 The Stranger-Painters Stranger-painters never comprised the majority of those who painted in England. Yet their influential presence from well back in time, as well as the broad xenophobia with which they were often received,1 serve as underlying themes to the painters’ occupation. As we’ve seen, the evidence of their work through the fifteenth century and well into the Tudor era suggests that their comings and goings over time were casual, frequent, and relatively unobstructed.2 But several events in and around the decade of the 1540s turned a page on that long-standing phase of foreign involvement, while shifts in religion and foreign policy under Elizabeth continued to move English visual culture in new directions. Finally, events at the opening of the seventeenth century in both England and abroad ushered in yet another phase of the strangers’ presence in the painters’ trade: one which endured into the Civil War years and, to some extent, beyond. The dissolution of monasteries and chantries, beginning in the mid-1530s and extending into the 1540s, effectively undermined much of the ecclesiastical patronage which had supported the lively visual display of pre-Reformation 1 Amidst a copious and scholarly literature, the main points regarding the extent of anti-immigrant sentiment in the Tudor and early Stuart years may be followed in, e.g., Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), pp. 262, 276, 279, 282–92; Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (1996), especially Chapter 2; Ian W. Archer, ‘Responses to Alien Immigration in London, c.1400–1650’, in Le migrazioni in Europa secc. XIII – XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi (Firenze, 1994), pp. 755–74; L.B. Luu, ‘Assimilation or Segregation: Colonies of Alien Craftsman in Elizabethan London’, in The Strangers’ Progress: Integration and Disintegration of the Huguenot and Walloon Refugee Community, 1567–1889, ed. R. Vigne and G. Gibbs, Huguenot Society of London (1995), pp. 186–98; Nigel Goose, ‘“Xenophobia” in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: An Epithet too Far?’ in Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, ed. Nigel Goose and Lien B. Luu (Brighton, 2005), pp. 110–35; Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (2010), Chapter 1; Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman, Immigrant England, 1300–1550 (Manchester, 2018), especially Chapters 10–11; and Ormrod, ‘England’s Immigrants, 1330–1550: Aliens in Later Medieval and Early Tudor England’, Journal of British Studies, 59 (April, 2020), 245–63. 2 Succinctly summarized in Kim Woods, ‘Immigrant Craftsmen and Imports’, in Gothic Art for England 1400–1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (2003), pp. 91–4. See also Caroline Barron and Nigel Saul (eds), England and the Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages (1995); J. Mitchell and M. Moran, England and the Continent in the Middle Ages: Studies in Memory of Andrew Martindale, Harlaxton Medieval Studies, VIII (Stamford, 2000); and J. Mitchell, ‘Painting in East Anglia Around 1500: The Continental Connection’, in ibid., pp. 365–80.

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times. A wave of even more vigorous iconoclasm and visual austerity followed under Edward VI. These events weighed heavily on painters of all stripe, speciality, and origin. For the stranger-painters feasting on English patronage, these years brought an additional threat. The continual popular resentment of immigrants in general and immigrant artisans and tradesmen in particular, bolstered by the fear of a French invasion in 1539, reached a climactic moment with legislation in 1540. The Act Concerning Strangers of that year (32 Henry VIII, c.16) restated legislative restrictions placed on foreigners extending back to the reign of Richard III, and called for their more vigorous enforcement.3 Most importantly, it distinguished between those strangers who had received letters of denization from the Crown and those who had not, placing severe restrictions on the economic activities of the latter. The former were still barred from taking on other strangers as apprentices, were limited to the employment of two journeymen strangers each, and were obliged to pay taxes at a higher rate. But they were allowed to take long-term leases, set up workshops, and enjoy many of the other benefits accruing to native-born Englishmen. Non-denizened strangers, presumably more poorly supported to begin with, were denied even these essential perquisites, making it very difficult legally to carry on their work beyond serving as journeymen for others. Some painters had chosen the path to denization following earlier legislation, and so were already secure by the 1540 Act. Then, too, the Act made exceptions for those, like Holbein, working directly in the royal service or otherwise protected by aristocratic patronage. In effect, that loophole allowed the more highly skilled strangers, and especially the portrait painters amongst them, to stay on and, in many cases, to prosper. So as to allow time to adjust to the new rules, the Act did not go into effect until the following Easter. But in practical terms, strangers now either had to become denizened or depart the realm. Enforcement of the statute became especially stringent when the war against France threatened a French invasion on the south coast. Non-denizened strangers were seen as an ever more pressing threat to England’s security. Many Frenchmen were summarily expelled. A scramble for denization quickly ensued. While eminent craftsmen like Holbein were able to remain, literally hundreds of his less eminent compatriots amongst the artisan and merchant communities felt obliged to leave. While the decade 1531–40 saw 340 letters of denization or an average of 34 a year, the following decade saw 3,591, or an average of 359 a year, with the biggest bulges coming in 1541 with 421 and in 1544 with an unprecedented 2,965.4 Enforcement proceeded intermittently thereafter. Top-tier painters who enjoyed royal or aristocratic patronage continued to be exempted from its restrictions. Some stranger-painters still trickled in. Yet insofar as it may have impacted 3

Ric. III, c.9 (1484); 14 & 15 Henry VIII, c.2 (1523); and 21 Henry VIII, c.16 (1529). William Page (ed.), Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England, 1509–1603, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, 8 (Lymington, 1893), p. lii. 4

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English painters and painting as a whole, the legislation contributed to a hiatus in the English reception of continental techniques and styles, perpetuating an insularity in visual culture as it did so. The accession of the Roman Catholic Mary brought a brief interlude in England’s relations with its foreign craftsmen. The brilliant Dutchman Hans Eworth (1520–78/9) rose to take Holbein’s place as the Crown’s most effective image-maker, while some parish congregations began to contemplate the restoration of destroyed or damaged imagery. But the moment proved ephemeral, failing to reverse much of the loss. Elizabeth’s accession and the subsequent unfolding of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion opened the door more widely to foreign protestant craftsmen whilst shutting it to most of Catholic Europe and its cultural expressions. Over the course of her first decade the outbreak of religious wars in France (from 1562) and in the Netherlands (from 1567) ensured a steady flow of protestant refugee artisans which continued through the rest of her reign and on into the next. Inspired by that resumed influx, the Elizabethan years saw marked developments in the demand for particular aspects of the painters’ trade. The burgeoning celebratory and festive culture of the Elizabethan court called for the employment of myriad painters in the Office of the Revels and elsewhere. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, glass painting, particularly associated with ‘stained’ glass windows in churches, had gone into abeyance from the 1540s and pretty much remained so throughout the century. But commissions to write or paint the Ten Commandments or other scriptural passages, to paint ecclesiastical furnishings like pews and even, for a time, funeral monuments, and to erect carved and/or painted representations of the royal arms, became more frequent. Population growth and the consequently more intense competition for social status accelerated the demand for arms painting and easel portraiture, and did so well beyond the Crown and court circle. Patronage opportunities for portrait painters opened up as never before amongst both civic institutions5 and individual patrons.6 While most of these other requirements were sufficiently filled by native English craftsmen, the stranger-painters remained particularly prominent in the provision of portraits for the Crown and court circle, and for the ‘better sort’ of people in general. In the early Stuart years the presence and role of stranger-painters changed again, and did so with dramatic effects. The impetus came from both home and abroad. In the former sense, James, Charles, and especially their queens, Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria of France, encouraged a more cosmopolitan approach to continental, even Roman Catholic, Europe and its cultural expressions. Charles I, the greatest patron of the arts of his time, had a famously 5 Robert Tittler, The Face of the City, Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007). 6 Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), especially Chapter 3.

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keen connoisseurial eye. He revelled in the latest continental styles, had his ambassadors recommend and recruit the best continental painters they could find, and spent far more than he should have on the fruits of their production. The likes of Daniel Mytens and the English-born but possibly foreign-trained Cornelius Johnson under James I, and then Rubens and Van Dyck in their turn, helped bring England’s appreciation of courtly portraiture, amongst its other visual arts, up to continental standards of artistry and fashion. At the same time, the emerging prominence in the 1620s of William Laud, with his philosophy of the ‘beauty of holiness’, brought lavish ornamentation back into the ecclesiastical setting. Amongst its other effects, that fashion revived the demand for glass painting, and thus a call for the mostly foreign glass painters who still practised the craft. The very foremost painters of the day, almost all of them foreigners, became virtual celebrities, the extent of their fame unprecedented in England by any living painter before them with the possible exception of Holbein.7 These courtly initiatives fortuitously coincided with events in Northern Europe, and especially in the Low Countries, which would dramatically affect the painters’ world on both sides of the English Channel. In sum, it is very difficult to understand those who painted for a living in early modern England in isolation from those influences from abroad. This familiar narrative sequence has long formed the backbone of scholarship on the visual arts of the era. It renders redundant the need to summarize the artistic achievements of that community or of such iconic foreign-born and/or foreign-trained figures as Holbein, Eworth, Hilliard, Mytens, Johnson, Rubens, or Van Dyck. But it does beg several questions. How, for example, did artisans from abroad gain their entrée in to the English scene and make connections within it? Where in the realm did they latch on? How were they received by the native English artisan community, and how did they interact with it in turn? Right from the beginning of the era many of the talented newcomers will have been brought over directly by high end patrons. Some such master craftsmen may have brought their assistants with them, as for example the sculptor Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528), who was accompanied by the painter Antonio Toto, also known as Toto del Nunziata (1498/9–1554). But sooner or later many of the strangers in this era will have had to expand their support networks beyond individual patrons so as to secure more permanent employment. Many will then have found their way to the King’s Works or, slightly later on, the Office of the Revels. 7 Though Holbein’s work must have had a substantial impact on his times, its immediate effect has been more difficult to assess. Save perhaps for John Bettes the elder (fl. c.1531– c.1563 or 1565), he had few if any direct followers and his work seems not to have been especially coveted and collected for several decades after his death in 1543. Susan Foister, Holbein and England (2004), pp. 263–9.

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The King’s Works extended back in time to at least the reign of Richard II, who appointed the first Clerk of the Works in 1378. Until the Tudors arrived on the scene the office had largely been concerned with the maintenance of royal buildings rather than the construction of new ones. Under the first two Tudors such buildings certainly required a great deal of maintenance. In addition, the dissolutions of the 1530s and 1540s brought a great number of new properties into royal hands and thus within the purview of that office. Henry VII undertook the construction of new buildings (including Richmond and Greenwich), and the large-scale extensions of extant buildings (especially at Windsor, Woking, and Woodstock but also at Westminster, Richmond Friary, Savoy Hospital, and King’s College Chapel in Cambridge) with unprecedented determination. Henry VIII built as well, though his projects tended to be secular rather than religious in nature.8 All of this new building, along with the widespread renovation of existing edifices, required a restructuring of the Works administration. That, in turn, meant a constant demand for skilled craftsmen:9 more, at times, than could be supplied by a native English workforce. In consequence, the Works saw a continual flow of foreign craftsmen, including painters, on almost every large project under its aegis.10 As a group these stranger-artisans were densely connected by dint of language and point of origin, marriage, friendship, apprenticeship, and residence. Many of them congregated in the South Bank suburbs of Bermondsey and Southwark. While some appear but once or twice in the records of payment, and some no doubt returned abroad after brief sojourns, others stayed on and rose to commanding positions in the organizational structure of the Works itself. In the early decades of the period at hand the most influential strangerpainters on the royal payroll were the Italians,11 their entrée secured in part by the vibrant and influential Italian banking communities then flourishing in both London and Southampton.12 Enterprising Florentine families like 8 D.R. Ransome, ‘The Administration of the Works’, in The History of the King’s Works, ed. H.M. Colvin, D.R. Ransome, and John Summerson (7 vols, 1963–82), III, pt I (1975), pp. 1–2. 9 Ransom, ‘The Administration of the Works’, pp. 3, 25 ff. 10 Colvin et al., History of the King’s Works, III, pt I. 11 See Michael Wild, The Italian Encounter with Tudor England (Cambridge, 2005) and especially Charlotte Bolland, ‘Italian Material Culture at the Tudor Court’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary College, London University, 2012). I am grateful to Dr Bolland for permission to cite her work. 12 In addition to Watt and Bolland as above, see especially the classic study by Alwyn Amy Ruddock, ‘Alien Merchants in Southampton in the Later Middle Ages’, English Historical Review, 61 (1946), 1–17, and important recent works including M.E. Bratchel, ‘Italian Merchant Organisation and Business Relationships in Early Tudor London’, Journal of European Economic History, 7:1 (1978), 1–28; Cinzia M. Sicca, ‘Consumption and Trade of Art between Italy and England in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century: The London House of the Bardi and Cavalcanti Company’, Renaissance Studies, 16:2 (2002), 163–201; Sicca and Louis A. Waldman (eds), The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance: Art for the Early Tudors (London and

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the Bardi and Cavalcanti encouraged courtly fashions in their own residences and dress, and they actively facilitated the arrival of Italian painters and other craftsmen into England.13 The presence of those craftsmen would extend well into the reign of Henry VIII, where many of them outlasted the very families responsible for their entry. Within the visual arts, it is probably sculpture, especially in the works of Torrigiano and Benedetto da Rovezzano (1474–1552), which has proven the most enduring element of this Anglo-Italian cultural axis. Yet the lively import of Italian paintings, and the role of English patrons who commissioned them, also had their effect. Such patronage emanated most vigorously from the Crown and court circle, but also from English merchants and travellers. The London merchant Paul Withypool (or Withipoll), for example, commissioned a triptych from the Venetian Antonio Solario (fl.1502–18),14 and was probably instrumental in Solario’s appearance in England in the year 1514. A follower of Giovanni Bellini and Vittore Carpaccio, Solario did at least two paintings whilst there, one of them probably a portrait of Thomas Knyvet and one of Withypool himself.15 But Solario’s quick departure was typical: considered a cultural backwater at that time, England was not seen by the major Italian artisans as a place to make a career whilst better opportunities beckoned from elsewhere.16 Most of those pre-Reformation stranger-painters who stayed on and settled in England were decorative painters of the second rank amongst their continental confreres. Even amongst the Italians, the Florentines had no lock on this market. The Neapolitan Vincent Volpe (fl.1511–36) was producing heraldic imagery and topographical drawings in England by 1514. He had likely been on hand for a year or so before that, and would enjoy a long career in the King’s Works and

New Haven, 2012); and Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli and Jessica Lutkin, ‘Perception, Identity, and Culture: The Italian Communities in Fifteenth-Century London and Southampton Revisited’, Studies in European Urban History, 42 (2017), 89–104. 13 This and the following paragraph derive from the Sicca and Waldman, The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance, Introduction and pp. 281–306. 14 Susan Foister, ‘Holbein, Antonio Toto, and the Market for Italian Painting in Early Tudor England’, in Sicca and Waldman (eds), The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance, pp. 281–4. 15 Catherine Reynolds, ‘England and the Continent: Artistic Relations’, in Gothic Art for England, 1400–1547, ed. Richard Marks and Paul Williamson (2003), p. 84; Foister, ‘Holbein, Antonio Toto, and the Market for Italian Painting’, p. 281. Sir Thomas Knyvet, a distinguished naval officer and son-in-law of Thomas Howard, second duke of Norfolk, was killed in 1512, so the portrait must either have been produced in Italy, or Solario must have come to England prior to 1512. Roger Virgoe, ‘Sir Edmund Knyvet’, in The History of Parliament, the House of Commons, 1509–1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff (3 vols,1982), II, pp. 482–3. 16 Bolland, ‘Italian Material Culture’, pp. 225–6.

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elsewhere until his death in 1536.17 The Milanese Ellis Carmyan (fl.1511–47) worked alongside Volpe at Greenwich in 1527 and elsewhere.18 Yet the most eminent and influential of the Italian painters remains the Florentine Toto. His ties with the Bardi and Cavalcanti families afforded him an easy entrée into the vibrant Anglo-Italian trade of the time. Toto had studied under and worked for Rodolfo Ghirlandaio before coming to England in 1519 to work with Torrigiano. Shortly thereafter he worked as well for the Bardi/ Cavalcanti merchant enterprise in London, painting in 1522 decorated canvases to enclose the loggia of the grand house of that merchant enterprise.19 Unlike Solario, who stayed but briefly, Toto found employment at court by 1530, successfully sued for a patent of denization in 1538, and become SergeantPainter to the Crown in January, 1544. Adroitly surviving the religious and political upheavals of the era, he retained that post and its attendant patronage until his death in or before November 1554. At one time or another during that stellar career he may have been the principal designer at Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace; he did heraldic work for Jane Seymour’s funeral in 1537; and he collaborated with the Florentine Giovanni di Benedetto da Maiano (fl. in England c.1519–40) on work at royal palaces. He also provided heraldic painting for the funeral of Henry VIII in 1547. A Chancery case of c.1538–44 suggests his additional involvement as a merchant, in which capacity he appears to have employed others as well.20 Whether he himself recruited them to England or not remains unclear, but Toto’s success undoubtedly helped sustain the flow of Italian craftsmen into England, allowing them to move out of the Italian merchant and banker community and into the King’s Works and the Office of the Revels. Like other such employees, multi-skilled Italians could use those perches as their base while they secured additional patronage elsewhere in the realm. Not only, for 17

Mary Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”: New Light on the Lives of Miniaturists and Large-scale Portrait Painters Working in London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Walpole Society, 47 (1978–80), 66; LMA, MS. DL/C/B004/MS09171/010/220; Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954), p. 190; Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1962), p. 166; Colvin et al., History of the King’s Works, IV, pp. 102, 418, 732. 18 ODNB, vide Carmeliano, Pietro; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, pp. 12, 13, 157; Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, pp. 17, 157–8; Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works, IV, 314. 19 Sicca, ‘Consumption and Trade of Art between Italy and England’, p. 177. 20 ODNB, vide Toto; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 145; Page, Letters of Denization, p. 233; Christopher Brown, ‘British Painting and the Low Countries’, in Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), p. 27; Roy Strong, ‘More Tudor Artists’, Burlington Magazine, 108 (1966), 83–5, repr. in Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy: Pageantry, Painting, Iconography (3 vols, Woodbridge, 1995), I, p. 152; Foister, ‘Holbein, Antonio Toto, and the Market for Italian Painting’, pp. 281–306; TNA, C.1/972/42; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 174–5.

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example, did the Florentine da Maiano work with Toto at Greenwich from about 1519 and then at Hampton Court and Windsor, but his versatility as a painter, sculptor, and dealer in wainscot also allowed him to take on additional commissions, probably including one at King’s College, Cambridge.21 One of the most durable of this talented Italian cohort was the Modenan Nicolo Bellini (c. 1490–1569), soon known as Nicholas Modena or Nicholas Bellin, who worked as a painter briefly in England in 1532, and returned in 1537. He had by that time also worked at the French court of Francis I (including time at Fontainebleau) from 1515 to 1522 and again from 1533 to 1537, and at the ducal court of Mantua before re-crossing the Channel. As versatile (if not as brilliant) as Holbein, he was highly sought after in both France and England for his skill as a painter, designer, and carver in both stone and stucco. His early post at the King’s Works opened up for him a long, successful, and well-rewarded career elsewhere in England, during which he, like Toto, skilfully negotiated the rigours of mid-century politics and religion. Faced with the denization statute of 1540, and along with such stellar figures as the ageing Holbein, and the industrious Florentine Bartholomeo Penni (1491–1553), Bellini chose to stay. His successful petition for denization bore fruit on 3 October 1541, and allowed him to retain two apprentices and four servants.22 His subsequent employment included painting, carving, gilding, and varnishing as a principal craftsman at Nonsuch from 1541–44; producing tomb monuments for William Pownsett in Barking, Essex as well as for Thomas Mason in Winchester Cathedral. He may additionally have worked on Bishop Stephen Gardiner’s chantry chapel. In 1551 he was expelled from Westminster in a dispute, probably concerning his Roman Catholic religion, had the expulsion reversed by the Privy Council, and then survived a challenge to that reversal in the Court of Requests in 1556/7. In 1562 he presented Queen Elizabeth with a painting – presumably by his own hand – of Patch, Henry VIII’s fool. When death came in 1567, he was accorded the honour of burial at St Margaret’s Westminster.23

21 Auerbach,

Tudor Artists, p. 176; Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, p. 15; Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (London and New Haven, 1993), p. 104; A.P. Darr, ‘Giovanni da Maiano II’, in Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner (34 vols, 1996), XX, p. 116. 22 Holbein’s stature at court would almost certainly have exempted him from this legislation, but he nonetheless chose to apply for, and subsequently received, a letter of denization in that year. Susan Foister, ‘Hans Holbein the Younger’, ODNB, vide Holbein, Hans and Eworth, Hans; Page, Letters of Denization, pp. 20, 189. 23 Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, pp. 17, 19, 155–6, 189; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, pp. 177–8; Strong, ‘More Tudor Artists’, I, p. 151; Martin Biddle, ‘Nonsuch, Henry VIII’s Mirror for a Prince: Sources and Interpretation’, in The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance, ed. Sicca and Waldman, pp. 319, 325–8; Page, Letters of Denization, p. 20; John Dent, The Quest for Nonsuch (1962), pp. 49–50, 283–4; Jane A. Lawson (ed.), The Elizabethan New Year’s Gift Exchanges 1559–1603, The British Academy (Oxford, 2013), item 62.177; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 143.

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In addition to the Italians, northerners continued to be influential as well. They would become even more so as events unfolded. Amongst the earliest to work for Henry VII and then for Henry VIII was the multi-talented Maynard Vewick (fl.1502–25), who seems to have been the preferred portrait painter of the former. He is now considered to be the ‘Mynours, the English painter’ who brought paintings of the English royal family to Scotland in 1502, but he was more likely a Dutchman. Accounts for payment identify him as the painter of two portraits of Margaret Beaufort done in 1510 and 1512 for the then substantial sum of £6 13s. 4d.24 He received payment for sundry works on Lady Margaret’s tomb, including the provision of patterns to Torrigiano who carried out the work. In a 1510 document at Christ’s he signed himself ‘meynnart Wewyck’ and is described as ‘of London, paynter’. Vewick wrote his will in 1522, but was still alive in 1525 when he received 100s. for his half year’s wages from the royal accounts.25 The most brilliant and celebrated northerner of this era was of course Hans Holbein the younger, whose sojourns in England, from 1526 to 1528 and then from 1531/2 to his death in 1543, mark a signal event in the history of English visual culture (see Fig. 1). It is Holbein who marshalled the iconic and magnificent image of Henry VIII and entered it into the fray of contemporary international politics. It is he who was entrusted with designing the title page of the Coverdale Bible. It is also Holbein whom posterity has singled out as the greatest painter to work in the England of the Tudors, and he who, more than anyone else, politicized the royal image for all time. Yet he was in many ways a man before his time and, as Susan Foister has concluded, his ‘legacy was ultimately to be admired rather than imitated’.26 He cannot be credited with creating an immediate following amongst other painters, nor was he by any means the only painter long and faithfully to serve the Tudor monarchy. The identification of the approximate year 1540 as something of a watershed has more to do with the ambient political and religious events of that time than with Holbein’s death three years later. While Holbein produced his myriad masterpieces at the very summit of the royal service, the now almost unknown Frenchman Nicholas Lyzard (d.1571) 24 Charlotte Bolland and Andrew Chen, ‘Maynard Wewyck and the Portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort in the Master’s Lodge, St John’s College, Cambridge’, Burlington Magazine, 161:1393 (April, 2019), 314–19. 25 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 144; LMA, MS DL/C/B004/MS09171/07/62v; Michael R. Apted and Susan Hannabuss (eds), Painters in Scotland, 1301–1700: A Biographical Dictionary, Scottish Record Society, n.s., 7 (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 68–9; Robert Willis and John Willis Clarke, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton (4 vols, Cambridge, 1886), II, p. 195; C.H. Cooper, Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, ed. J.E.B. Mayor (Cambridge, 1874), p. 198; R.F. Scott, ‘On the Contracts for the Tomb of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby, Mother of King Henry VII’, Archaeologia, 66 (1915), 365–72; Lorne Campbell, The Early Flemish Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge, 1985), p. xv. 26 Susan Foister, Holbein in England (2006), p. 113.

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Fig. 1. Hans Holbein the Younger, attr. Lucas Horenbout (c. 1540). more typically represented the stranger-painters of his time. Lyzard gained his first, tenuous perch in the foothills of royal employment in the 1520s with decorative work on royal properties under Toto’s supervision, thus beginning his long, lucrative, and – in its own way – influential career. By 1544, the year after Holbein’s death, Lyzard was collaborating with Bartolomeo Penni painting and decorating Sir Thomas Cawarden’s house in Whitefriars for the very substantial sum of £178 19s. 30

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The Office of Sergeant Painter had traditionally been held by Englishmen, but the tide turned when Antonio Toto succeeded Andrew Wright (fl.1518–43) around 1544, and it continued on that course when Toto gave way to Lyzard in 1554. That office, and his work in the Revels, kept Lyzard busy directing painting work for the obsequies of the crowned heads of Europe in the 1550s and 1560s, and painting all manner of objects for ceremonial and mimetic activities. In January 1556, he presented Queen Mary with a painting of Christ washing his disciples’ feet, which may or may not have been his own work, but he had no difficulty switching allegiances at her death. Three years later he presented Queen Elizabeth with a painting of The History of Assuerus as a New Year’s gift. He continued in her reign as Sergeant Painter and also received commissions from Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in 1559 and 1566, working actively until his death in April 1571. Though never by any stretch of the imagination Holbein’s equal as an artist, Lyzard’s career more accurately typifies the successful stranger-painters of his time, creating his own sort of legacy in the process. At least four of his sons – John (d.1565), William (d.1585), Nicholas the younger (fl.1571/2–post-1574), and Lewis (d.1589) – and a probable nephew or cousin also named John (d.1574), became painters in his wake: a veritable dynasty of painters at work in the English royal service over more than half a century.27 In addition to Frenchmen like the Lyzards and the Italians, Netherlandish craftsmen were also making their mark. Amongst this early generation we find the Ghent-trained limner Gerard Horenbout (d.1540/41), father of Lucas (d.1544), and Susanna (d. pre-1554), who came to the royal service in England after serving as valet de chambre and painter to Margaret of Austria. Gerard brought his experience in manuscript illumination, window design, and portraiture. Henry employed him until sometime between 1531 and 1538 with a monthly wage of 33s. 4d. While in England he is known to have illuminated manuscripts and produced at least one altar-piece, though he has tentatively been credited with several other works, and was usually referred to as a painter. He was well-regarded by other émigré painters in England, collaborated with his son Lucas, and probably worked on royal properties.28

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ODNB, vide Lyzard; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, pp. 145–6; Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”’, p. 178; TNA, C.1/1307/70 and PROB 11/53/187; Surrey Record Office, Loseley Park MS LM/716; Strong, ‘More Tudor Artists’, pp. 83–5, repr. in Strong, The Tudor and Stuart Monarchy, I, p. 150; Colvin et al., History of the King’s Works, III, pp. 38, 411; IV, 108, 253; Lawson, New Year’s Gift Exchanges, item 59.212; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 131–2; Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I (London and New Haven, 2014), p. 55. 28 National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Hornebolte, Gerard; Katherine Coombs, The Portrait Miniature in England (1998), p. 15; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 171; ODNB, vide Horenbout, Gerard; Lorne Campbell and Susan Foister, ‘Gerard, Lucas, and Susannah Horenbout’, Burlington Magazine, 128:1003 (1986), 719–27.

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The arrival of the painters Susanna Horenbout (fl.1521–pre-1554) in the early 1520s and Levina Teerlinc (d.1576) in 1545 made for an additional and somewhat novel presence among painters in England at that time. Women were more likely to have received some training as painters in continental lands than in England. Both Horenbout and Teerlinc came with established reputations as painters in their own right and with excellent connections in the trade. Yet it has proven very difficult indeed to attribute any particular works to their authorship, or to substantiate their contributions to the English scene.29 Notwithstanding that particular uncertainty, the success of stranger-painters in general over the first half of the sixteenth century allowed them to gain a firm footing at least in the London metropolis, and to establish their skills within and beyond the courtly circles of the day. Their training often imparted versatility in several media, and a grounding in sundry fashions, theories, and techniques which were still beyond the grasp of most native English artisans. From at least the mid-century years many of the newcomers brought an understanding of linear perspective and the use of shadow to create the illusion of depth, and had mastered the blending of colours by painting ‘wet on wet’. Many of them had also worked in the more refined and cosmopolitan continental courts in which painting had come to be considered a quasi-academic discipline of the liberal arts. Painters of that ilk catered to a refined public, well read in classical literature, philosophy, and history. They were expected to have a firm footing in those same disciplines. In sum, their work was ‘foreign’ to the English scene in its intellectual foundations as well as in its style, theory, and workmanship. All of these attributes set them further apart from their native English hosts. Of those decades which bore most decisively on the painters’ trade, the 1560s proved just as significant as the 1540s. The inception in those years of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion and the simultaneous redirection of English foreign policy away from most of the Catholic states of Europe prompted a correspondingly sharp turn away from Italian and (save for the Huguenots) French influences on English cultural expression. At the same time, the political upheavals in France and the Low Countries set England’s political and cultural outlook in new directions. None of those continental states were ever quite the same thereafter, nor was England in either its political stance or its approach to visual culture. As Elizabethan England came to view Roman Catholic Europe and its cultural attainments with wariness and trepidation, it was the Dutch émigré 29

The controversy surrounding their accomplishments extends back to much earlier scholarship, but became particularly sharp with the publication of Susan E. James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603 (Farnham, Surrey, 2009). James’s thesis is placed in its historiographical context and critically evaluated in Robert Tittler, ‘The “Feminine Dynamic” in English Art: A Reassessment’, British Art Journal, 17:1 (Spring, 2016), 123–31.

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community and the artisanal traditions of the Northern Renaissance in general which had the most complete and telling influence on English painting and painters for a long time thereafter. Antonio Toto may have studied with Rodolfo Ghirlandaio, worked under the direction of Torrigiano, and wound up as Sergeant Painter to the Crown, but his influence never sufficed to impart much of those Italian classical traditions to the native English painters alongside whom he eventually worked and even supervised. In any event, those English painters will have been insufficiently skilled, and their approach to painting insufficiently theoretized, to have absorbed much of what he might have taught them. In the long run, whatever the native English might have learned from that tradition gave way before the changing circumstances of Reformation era politics, leaving the northern, protestant traditions of painting as well as religion to dominate the field. In the event, the choice of competing with or assimilating that more sophisticated visual culture of the Northern Renaissance provided an enduring challenge for native English painters. Along with the other ambient circumstances of the day, it helped shape many aspects of the painters’ trade. To the casual observer, the French state of the mid-sixteenth century may have seemed stable and prosperous. Yet constant warfare had placed it deeply in debt. It was also riven with political factionalism and a growing religious division between traditional Catholics and ardent reformers of an increasingly Calvinist bent. Only the monarchy of Henry II (r.1547–59) held it together, and when he was tragically killed in 1559 the centre came unglued. The succession, in turn, of his feeble and incompetent sons, Francis I (r.1559–60), Charles IX (r.1560–74), and Henry III (r.1574–89), proved unable to contain powerful rival factions. Civil wars about the royal succession and especially religion ensued for much of the rest of the century. Thousands of Huguenots fled before the real threat of annihilation, and many of them crossed the Channel to England. One of them was the Huguenot adventurer, limner, and diarist Jacques LeMoyne (c.1532/3–1588/9), who settled in Blackfriars in 1580, though that was not his first visit. In 1564 he had been sent to North America by the French Admiral Chatillion to make drawings of discoveries and to chart the mid-Atlantic coast. Before returning to France he appears to have stopped at Swansea and Bristol and to have stayed on for a time in London. He probably learned some English along the way. His accomplishments brought him to the attention of men like Raleigh, who learned of his drawings from Richard Hackluyt. When, around 1580, LeMoyne and his family needed to flee from imminent prosecution, Raleigh provided a home for them at Blackfriars. There LeMoyne lived and worked as a Huguenot refugee until his death in 1588. His wife perpetuated his influence by giving Hackluyt his drawings and travel diaries so that they could be published. Hackluyt brought that project to fruition (albeit without illustrations) in 1590.30 30 R.E.G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk (eds), Return of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London (4 vols, Aberdeen, 1900–08), II, p. 354; Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in

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Though LeMoyne’s work was important and his influence on England’s understanding of the New World remained significant, it was not much matched by many other French immigrants at the time. Some, like the Huguenot painter Gualtier Dare (or Daré?) who came with his wife and children around 1560, simply never gained the prominence to create a paper trail beyond a record of denization.31 Much the same may be said of the pattern-drawer and copyist Pierre Geberd, whom we at least know to have settled with his wife Katryn in Old Bailey in 1568.32 Jacques de Bray (d.1598 or ’99) came to England in 1572 and established a long-term residence in Bishopsgate without ever becoming a denizen. He applied for a licence to join the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, 1582/3, and was cited in returns of aliens for 1582, 1583, and 1593, the last of which placed him in London’s Bridge Ward. De Bray’s fame may not have endured to our time, but in his Palladis Tamia of 1598 the writer and translator Francis Meres listed de Bray as one of the most prominent painters of his time.33 French Huguenot painters of one sort or another had long been present in England prior to the 1560s and sundry others would arrive even after the French Wars came to an end. But neither their numbers nor their influence were ever as great as those who came from the Low Countries. It is they who would have the greater impact on English painting and painters. That new Netherlandish wave gathered momentum after 1567, when Philip II of Spain sent the duke of Alva to impose a more strenuous rule: a strategy which soon provoked full-scale revolt against Spanish domination. When Philip inherited the dukedom of Burgundy from his father, the Emperor Charles V, he found a cosmopolitan, highly urbanized and commercialized, and strongly independent heartland with some well-entrenched areas of Calvinist belief. Charles had understood the regional society and culture, respected its integrity, and tolerated its diversity. Philip, by contrast, saw it as ripe fruit to be picked in support of his ambitions elsewhere. By 1566 his imposed Spanish absolutism with its high taxation and political repression created the maelstrom of open revolt, prompting Alva’s mission to put it down in the following year.

England (1786, repr., 1871), p. 101; Stefanie Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst im London des 17. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim; Zurich; New York, 2000), p. 244; James Ayres, Art, Artisans and Apprentices: Apprentice Painters and Sculptors in the Early Modern British Tradition (Oxford and Philadelphia, 2014), p. 33; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 129; P.H. Hulton, The Work of Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, Huguenot Artist in France, Florida, and England (2 vols, 1977), passim; Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill, N. Carolina, 2005), p. 1. 31 Baron Fernand D.G. de Schickler, Les Eglises du Refuge en Angleterre (3 vols, Paris, 1892), I, p. 115, n. 1. 32 Kirk and Kirk, Return of Aliens, I, p. 423. 33 Ibid., II, pp. 266, 310, 327 and III, p. 344; Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598) also known as Wit’s Commonwealth, the Second Part, a Treasurie of Diuine, Morall, and Phylosophicall Similies (1634), p. 636; Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters (3rd edn, Woodbridge, 1988), p. 35.

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The brutality of the ensuing occupation prompted a mass flight of protestant and even some Catholic refugees. Some fled northwards to safer parts of their homeland whilst others fled abroad to whatever sanctuary they could find. In many cases, that meant England, thus retracing a familiar route of trade, migration, and short-term sojourning which extended back under more casual circumstances for many centuries. England’s highly developed maritime, commercial, and urban society offered Dutch and Flemish-speaking refugees a familiar social and economic milieu, and England drew them to its shores in as great or greater numbers than it did their French Huguenot contemporaries. In addition, they often had friends, business contacts, and fellow countrymen already in place. Most of the French, by contrast, had left England after the hostilities between the two nations of the early 1540s and the consequent legislation requiring the denization of those who remained. The number of strangers present in mid-sixteenth-century London and its suburbs has provoked some controversy.34 The progressive protestant regime of Edward VI certainly made it a more welcoming refuge than ever before, but the hostility of the Marian regime, expressed, inter alia, in a 1554 proclamation calling for the imprisonment of ‘seditious’ aliens and the forfeiture of their goods,35 sharply reversed that trend. Many left. Yet merchants, diplomatic servants, and those already denizened were exempted, preserving a core of well-established settlers around whom newcomers could gather thereafter, with whom they could speak their language, and from whom they could seek help with housing and employment.36 Somewhere around 5,000 strangers at the accession of Elizabeth, with the number climbing sharply thereafter, thus seems about right. The ‘Return of Aliens’ in London and its suburbs taken in 1568, a decade after Elizabeth’s accession and a few years into the sixties’ wave of protestant refugees, counted 2,823 who attended an English parish church or none at all, and 3,720 who attended either the French or Dutch strangers’ churches.37 Given the inefficiency of contemporary survey methods, those numbers may well underestimate London’s total stranger population. It may by that time have amounted to 7,000 or even 8,000.38 Even then their presence probably appeared greater in the public imagination than in reality. The disparity may be explained by the 34

Andrew Pettegree has estimated there were 5,000 to 6,000 strangers in London alone by 1547, while Laura Hunt Yungblut reworked his figures to produce a range of 4,000 to 5,000. Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, p.78, n.6; Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us, pp. 12–13. 35 ‘Ordering Deportation of Seditious Aliens’, issued 17 February 1554, targeted all foreigners save for denizens, merchants, and servants to foreign diplomats. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations (3 vols, London and New Haven, 1964–9), II, pp. 31–2. 36 Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, pp. 119–20. 37 Kirk and Kirk, Return of Aliens, III, pp. 439. 38 This estimate concurs with Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us, p. 23.

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concentration of strangers in particular parts of the city, which made them more visible. The Hansard merchants collected around the Steelyard which served as their centre of business. Artisans settled heavily outside the walls in the poorer east end, the small intra-mural liberty of St Martin-le-Grand, and the suburbs of Southwark and St Katherine’s: areas where they were less likely to face the power of search maintained by the city’s various livery companies. Save for Scots along the northern borders, strangers settling elsewhere in the realm were, and had long been, thinner on the ground and prove much more difficult to track.39 The single most complete source for the migrations of the mid-century remains the published ‘Returns of Aliens’ taken in 1568 and 1571. But it was only done for London and its immediate environs. The few surviving analogous returns for specific places like Norwich and Southampton do not turn up many painters. The consequent impression thus privileges the London settlement at the expense of others. And yet some stranger-painters did turn up, as they had long done, in provincial, even rural, locales, where their presence has been recorded in estate records and other forms of evidence. One of them was the Dutchman Melchoir Salaboss, active in England between 1571 and 1588, who painted the great triptych panels of the Cornwall family monument at Burford St Mary in Shropshire (see Fig. 2). He may also have painted the wooden monuments at Shelsley Walsh and Stockton-on-Teme nearby in Worcestershire.40 The fact that he is not recorded in the London Returns, and that he worked in rural settings in two provincial shires over the better part of two decades, suggests that he and others like him could become successful itinerants without leaving us much of a trail. They will have picked up work wherever they could find it, not necessarily settling long enough in any one place to be recorded as resident. Salaboss’s evident itinerancy will have perpetuated what has already been described as an age-old pattern of stranger-painters and other craftsmen, almost all of them anonymous to us, who found their way to England. They may not have left a written record of their activities, but the distinctive character of their work at least serves as a footprint of their presence. As we’ve seen, most of that work has been identified in East Anglia and other coastal areas.41 In Norwich 39

Ormrod’s conclusions regarding the national distribution of aliens in the mid-fifteenth century shows this to have been the case then, and little had changed over the following century. Ormrod, ‘England’s Immigrants’, pp. 247–51. 40 Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 72, 82–3 (and Fig. 55), 204–5; National Portrait Gallery Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Salaboss/Salabosse/Salabuss, Melchoir; Christopher Wright, Catherine Gordon, and Mary Peskett Smith (eds), British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections (New Haven and London, 2006), p. 700; Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1962), p. 31; Waterhouse, Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters, p. 238; John Newman and Nikolaus Pevsner, Buildings of England: Shropshire (2nd edn, London and New Haven, 2006), p. 186, plate 62. 41 This is of course true for native English painters as well. See, e.g., Audrey Baker, English Panel Paintings, 1400–1558: A Survey of Figure Paintings in East Anglian Rood Screens (2011), pp.

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Fig. 2. Melchoir Salaboss, The Cornwall Family Monument (1588), St Mary’s Church, Burford, Shropshire. (where the Dutch and Flemish community comprised an estimated third of the city’s population by late sixteenth century)42 the Dutch painter whose name had been anglicized to William Bartringham succumbed in the plague year of 1579.43 Still others turn up far from such points of entry. Strangers like the Antwerper Katherine Maynour, who was living in Ampthill, Bedfordshire when she was denizened in 1540,44 and Salaboss himself, found their way well beyond. Nor would they be the last of their kind. In the much smaller Dorset county town 142, 197; Lucy Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context for the Artistic Production of Painted Surfaces in England: Evidence from East Anglia, c. 1400–1540’, in Painting in Britain, 1500–1630, ed. Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard, and Edward Town (Oxford, 2015), pp. 197–201; John Mitchell, ‘Painting in East Anglia: The Continental Connection’, in England and the Continent, ed. Mitchell and Moran, pp. 365–80; and Andrew Moore, Dutch and Flemish Painting in Norfolk: A History of Taste and Influence, Fashion and Collecting (1988). 42 Moore, Dutch and Flemish Painting, p. xiii. 43 W.J.C. Moens (ed.), The Walloons and their Church at Norwich: Their History and Registers, 1565–1832 (2 parts, Lymington, 1887–8), II, p. 124. 44 Page, Letters of Denization, p. 168; James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII (21 vols in 33 parts, 1862–1920), 16, item 305,

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of Dorchester, the Recorder William Whiteway described the five-week sojourn in that community of the French itinerant painter Charles Gage (possible anglicized from Gagé or Gagné), where he painted local patrons and instructed local people in the craft of painting. Charles Gage, father and son, both received a patent of denization in March 1632/3. It is not clear which of the two came through Dorchester, but neither is recorded thereafter in London.45 Most of the known stranger-painters employed outside London have come to our attention because they worked on the provincial estates of prominent patrons. As the concentration of major residential building projects shifted from royal patronage under the first two Tudors to the private endeavours of the aristocracy and gentry thereafter, painters’ employment shifted with it. That employment effectively allowed numerous strangers to work outside the London/Westminster metropolis and away from the searching eyes of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. At the same time, it satisfied the sophisticated patron’s desire for more refined work than most native English artisans could yet produce. Such arrangements grew more common with the passage of time. When, in the 1540s, the French painter Didier Bonayre dwelt with and worked for the earl of Hertford,46 he will have been one of the very few to enjoy such patronage. In the Elizabethan years and beyond, Lucas de Heere’s wall paintings at Sir Thomas Smith’s Hill Hall,47 Hubert Beuckelaer’s work for the earl of Leicester through much of the 1580s and ’90s,48 the Fleming John (‘Jehan’) Balechouse’s production and supervision of the visual artistry at Hardwick Hall,49 and Hendrick de Keyser’s service in the household of Henry Clifford, no. 25. Maynour, about whom little else is known, was recorded as a widow in her denization document, and may have had a husband who moved with her to Bedfordshire. 45 William Whiteway, ‘The Diary of William Whiteway of Dorchester’, BL, Egerton MS. 784, fol. 96r.; Anon. (ed.), William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary, 1618–1635, Dorset Record Society, 12 (1991), p. 134 and n. 13; William Shaw (ed.), Letters of Denization and Acts of Naturalization for Aliens in England and Ireland, 1603–1700, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London, 18 (1911), p. 48. 46 Page, Letters of Denization, 25; www.englandsimmigrants.com, vide Bonayre. 47 Lucas de Heere (1534–84). R. Simpson,’Sir Thomas Smith and the Wall Painting at Hill Hall, Essex’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 130 (1977), 1–20, especially pp. 17–20. I am grateful to Professor Norman Jones for this reference. 48 Beuckelear, also known in England as Hubbart or Hubbard after the Anglicization of his forename, lived from 1521 to sometime before 1554; Josua Bruyn, ‘Hubert (Huybert) Beuckelaer, an Antwerp Portrait Painter and his English Patron, the Earl of Leicester’, in Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1550–1800, ed. Juliette Roding et al. (Leiden, 2003), pp. 85–112. 49 Balechous, d. 1618. Malcolm Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999), pp. 71, 157; Basil Stallybrass, ‘Bess of Hardwick’s Buildings and Building Accounts’, Archaeologia, 2nd series, 64 (1913), 398; D.N. Durant and P. Riden, eds, The Building of Hardwick Hall, I: The Old Hall, 1587–91, Derbyshire Record Society, IV (Chesterfield, 1980), xxvi and Ibid., II, The New Hall, 1591–98, IX (1984), lxviii–lxx; David N. Durant, The Smythson Circle: The Story of Six Great English Houses (2011), 131, 153–5, 186; Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (1997), pp. 275–6,

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fifth earl of Cumberland, between 1631 and 1638,50 suggest an increasingly common pattern of aristocratic patronage emanating from country estates. Balechouse’s presence at Hardwick, extending from 1591 to his death in 1618, is particularly interesting. Over that span he served as a regular member of the Cavendish household at a base salary of £2 per year plus keep, in addition to which he received stipends for particular projects and frequent rewards. The latter included a rent-free farm at Bolsover and possession of the New Inn at Hardwick, for which he served as landlord until his death. He was almost certainly responsible for much of the painted decoration of the New Hall and the painted cloths in the chapel. In the process he seems also to have worked in a supervisory capacity from 1591 to 1597 or after, enjoying a long-term association with Hardwick’s designer, the great Robert Smythson.51 This sort of arrangement was probably even more common amongst the stranger-painters of the era than is indicated by surviving records. De Heere turns up in the ‘Return of Aliens’ and his career comes to our attention in sundry other ways,52 but Balechouse and de Keyser were not so recorded. Without the household accounts of their employers, they may well have remained unknown to us. As the public for portraiture in particular expanded in wider social and geographic circles, one gets the impression that any accomplished portraitist – which almost always meant any of the better stranger-painters – could accept commissions outside London whenever and wherever they chose to do so. The services of such painters became ever more widely sought, and considerable prestige could accrue to whomever enticed such men to come down from London for a working visit. One thinks of the prestige which Sir Arnold Braemes, a newish member of the Kentish gentry community, must have gained in 1636 when he enticed the eminent English-born but Dutch-trained Cornelius Johnson (1593–1661) to come and stay for several weeks at his east Kent estate at Bridge. Johnson used Braemes’s home as a base from which to accept commissions for a regional circle of Braemes’s friends and neighbours before moving back to London.53

285–9, 298; Philip Riden (ed.), The Household Accounts of William Cavendish: Lord Cavendish of Hardwick, 1597–1607, Part 2, Derbyshire Record Society, 41 (Chesterfield, 2016), p. 38, n. 6, and 182. 50 ODNB, vide Clifford, Henry. 51 J.C. Davies, A History of Borlase School (Aylesbury, 1932), p. 82; Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House, pp. 71, 157; Stallybrass, ‘Bess of Hardwick’s Buildings and Building Accounts’, p. 398; Durant and Riden, Hardwick Hall, I, p. xxvi and II, pp. lxviii–lxx; Durant, The Smythson Circle, pp. 131, 153–5, 186; Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration, pp. 275–6, 285–9, 298; Riden, Accounts of William Cavendish, pp. 38, n. 6, and 182. 52 Kirk and Kirk (eds), Return of Aliens, I, pp. 370, 374, 441; II, p. 40; III, p. 394. 53 Robert Tittler, ‘Painters’ and Patrons’ Circles in Provincial England, c.1580–1640’, in Painting in Britain, 1500–1630 (Oxford, 2015), 379.

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Many, perhaps most, of these newcomers from the 1560s especially came not, as had formally been the more common experience, primarily as economic migrants, drawn by the hope of better opportunities. A greater number now came as religious and political refugees, pushed from their homelands by fear of persecution and seeking safe ground wherever they could find it. Under these circumstances, many took flight in a hurry, and without much chance to plan ahead. Balthasar Kerman or Kerreman (1528–88) had been involved in clandestine Calvinist activities and then imprisoned in Antwerp for having baptized his children as Calvinists. Shortly after his release (or escape?) from prison he fled to England with his wife Barbara and his two young sons.54 The rapidity of some of these departures not only meant an emotional wrench but, as Andrew Pettegree has shown in a study of strangers’ wills, also entailed a sacrifice of property and material possessions, and a separation from relatives and friends.55 Those personal ties which could be retained, on the other hand, enhanced the emigres’ ability to serve as intermediaries between their host society and their place of origin. By contrast to the court-employed giants of the day like Hans Holbein and then Hans Eworth whose reputations preceded them, less prominent newcomers like Kerreman had a hard time finding work in their country of refuge. Effectively excluded from membership in the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, which saw them as interlopers, and legally barred from apprenticing their children to the same (despite having to pay the same quarterage fees as the members),56 they most often pursued contacts amongst landsmen and kin. It helped that many of the settlers will have known each other from earlier times in places like Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent,57 and from training in the same guilds – perhaps even with the same masters – in those centres. Antwerp’s Guild of St Luke had long proven a particularly busy crossroads for Dutch and Flemish

54 Hope

Walker, ‘Netherlandish Painters in Tudor London, 1560–1580’ (unpublished MPhil Thesis, Courtauld Institute, 2014), 188. I am grateful to Ms Walker for permission to cite her thesis and for her comments on the subject. 55 Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 227–34. 56 Quarterage was normally paid by company members, and constituted one of the most important sources of a company’s income. But the Painter-Stainers’ Ordinances laid down in 1582 and undoubtedly affirming customary usage specified that anyone painting within four miles of London but not a member of the Livery pay quarterage as well, and at the same rate as liverymen themselves. Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), 108; Painter-Stainers’ Company Ordinances, as published in City of London: Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix (III, 1884), 617. 57 Though the origins of many strangers remain obscure, ’sixties’ arrivals from Antwerp in this era included Jan Benson, Jan Bogaerts the Younger, Stabull Hovaunt, Balthazar Kerreman, both Hans and Henrick Orlens, Martin Taye, and Louis de Wale. Brugeians included Benson again, and Jan De Franc, whilst de Heere, Francis Hony, and Lyeuen de Vous hailed from Ghent. Walker, Netherlandish Painters, Appendix III.

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painters. Whether native Antwerpers or not, many who would eventually emigrate took their training or worked under its aegis.58 Whereas some of the older and more experienced stranger-painters of the mid-sixteenth century, men like Andrew van de Pitt or Vandepit (cited 1568) and Joris Hofnagel (1542 or 1545–1600), came for relatively short periods before moving on, others subsequently came with their wives, children, and even servants, or they married after arrival, settling in as best they could for the longue durée.59 The Brabanter Henrick de Campion and his wife Janakin came with their two children in 1568.60 The talented ‘picture-maker’ Jan Benson (1530–73) and his wife Tannykin had brought two of their children over from Bruges, and by 1568 they were living in another Dutchman’s Portsoken Ward tenement. By 1571 Benson had all eight of his children with him and had moved to St Dunstan in the East.61 It could hardly be said that Benson was a young painter seeking to forge a career in England. Thirty-eight years old on his arrival, he had left behind a well-established career. Son of the Bruges painter Ambrosias Benson, Jan had been a member of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp, then the Painters and Saddlers’ Guild of Bruges, and then Bruges’ Guild of St Barbe, before coming to England sometime between 1564 and 1566. His ability to support eight children and to move out of temporary quarters and into his own household within a few years suggests considerable success in his new country.62 The large number of contemporary paintings attributed simply to the ‘Dutch School’ must have been done by men like Benson. They rarely if ever signed their work, and so have never appeared on that mental check-list of painters’ names which one calls upon in efforts to assign attribution. Yet their apparent success suggests considerable productivity. The fact that, when first recorded, Benson lived in a Dutchman’s tenement will have been entirely typical. Lodgings served as important points of contact both amongst newcomers and between newcomers and the native English. They might bear particular significance when near neighbours were also painters or worked in associated trades. Leonard Adrianson (c. 1536–post-1583), who 58

Maximilian Martens and Natasja Peeters, ‘“A Tale of Two Cities”: Antwerp Artists and Artisans in London in the Sixteenth Century’, in Roding et al., Dutch and Flemish Artists, 31–56. 59 For Vandepit, see Walker, Netherlandish Painters, 184; for Hofnagel, see Town, ‘A Biographical Directory’, 108–9. 60 Walker, Netherlandish Painter, 181; Kirk and Kirk (eds), Return of Aliens, III, 352. 61 The term ‘picture-maker’ referred to a specialist in portraiture. Kirk and Kirk, Return of Aliens, II, 131; III, 377. An alternative explanation to the expanded number of children may lie in Jan’s possible remarriage to a widowed parent, as Jan’s wife was identified as Antholina rather than Tannykin in 1571. It is also possible, though extremely unlikely, that there were two contemporary Jan Bensons who were both painters, and whose children both included a Josina and a Barnard. 62 Page, Letters of Denization, 21; Stefanie Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, 152–3; Walker, Netherlandish Painters, 179–80.

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probably illuminated books and manuscripts, lived with two men who made printing supplies.63 The Dutch painters Hans Beare (cited 1568–71) and Gyllinge Vanstemsyken (fl.1567–post-1571) lived in the same house in Langbourne Ward, and both attended Austin Friars’ Church. Jan de Frank (d.1570) rented his flat from the native English Painter-Stainer Thomas Bullock (fl.1531–76) and also attended Austin Friars. Henrick and Hans Orlens (both cited in 1568), and the English carver Richard Stevens all lived in the parish of St Olave, Southwark, as tenants to the same landlord. Hans and Hendrik attended Austin Friars as well. Martin Taye (in England c. 1568–71 ff.) and his journeyman Jan Boghaert the younger (fl. in England, 1571–post-1585) worked at painting pots for the Dutch potter Jacob Janson and may also have lived in Janson’s household workshop.64 Especially in the first generation, strangers naturally tended to marry the sisters or daughters of landsmen with whom they shared a common language, religion, and cultural outlook. Stranger-painters were no different. They often apprenticed their children to fellow painters and collaborated with still others at work. The family ties and marital connections amongst such families as the Gheeraertses,65 de Critzes,66 or Olivers67 could be complex and multi-generational. While such ties did not always intentionally exclude native English families, much less English painters, they did undoubtedly have that effect. The tendency to ‘keep it in the family’ never became a hard and fast rule, but for the first generation or two it remained more of a logical strategy for strangers than for native English families. As must already be apparent, the stranger churches served as meeting places and informal welcome centres well beyond their religious functions. While some strangers of an earlier migration had begun by the 1560s to attend regular parish churches, the Austin Friars and the French Church on Threadneedle Street readily accommodated those of the mid-century and beyond. Situated just south of London Wall in the northern edge of the City, Austin Friars accommodated hundreds of the mid-century Dutch and Flemish arrivals (see Fig. 3). The Church of that former friary, given to the Dutch community in 1550, quickly proved its value as an important social as well as religious resource until the stringent counter-Reformation of the Marian years curtailed its activities. The resumption of its patent and operation in February 1561 restored that essential resource to the community, making its multiple functions available to serve the migration that would so shortly ensue. As Hope Walker has suggested, it may well have served the many painters as something of a surrogate base for the St Luke’s guilds to which most had belonged in the old country, and whose London counterpart, the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, was effectively 63 Walker,

Netherlandish Painters, 176. Ibid., Appendix III, see by name. 65 See this worked out in full detail in Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 86–8. 66 Edmond, ‘Limners and Picture-Makers’, 134–55; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 65–8. 67 Edmond, ‘Limners and Picture-Makers’, 134–55; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 149. 64

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Fig. 3. The Dutch Church, Austin Friars, drawn in the late eighteenth century.

closed to them.68 At the same time, it provided a mediatory role between their own parishioners on the one hand and the ambient native English society on the other,69 even managing to coordinate petitions to the London City Government or the Privy Council for redress of grievances.70 Though the Dutch and other strangers especially of the first generation may have remained distinct from their hosts by dint of language, places of worship, and custom, these safe havens allowed the cultural gap between the newcomers and their hosts gradually to narrow over the years. Most barriers to direct collaboration or actual apprenticeship remained in place, but at least some of the more enterprising English painters began to observe their work, to read about 68

Hope Walker, ‘Netherlandish Immigrant Painters and the Dutch Reformed Church of London, Austin Friars, 1560–1580’, Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art, 63 (2013), 75. The church miraculously escaped the Great Fire. 69 See ibid., and, more generally, Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, Chapters 8 and 9, and Andrew Spicer, ‘“A Place of Refuge and Sanctuary of a Holy Temple”: Exile Communities and the Stranger Churches’ in Nigel Goose (ed.) Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England (Brighton, 2005), 91–109. 70 Ian W. Archer, ‘Responses to Alien Immigration in London, c. 1450–1650’, in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Migrazioni in Europa secc: XIII–XVIII (Florence, 1994), 769–71.

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it in, for example, Haydocke’s translation of Giovanni Lomazzo,71 and even to collect it in the form of the prints which became more frequently available from stationers and booksellers.72 The strangers’ indirect impact also extended to the supply of materials which they facilitated, and upon which many English painters came to rely. The politics of the Reformation era may have constrained the supply of some such items from some parts of Europe, but it perpetuated and even enhanced the supply from others. In this exchange, the Low Countries, and especially the cities of Antwerp and then, after c. 1585, Amsterdam, had long proven an essential link between the painters and patrons of the British Isles and continental sources of myriad commodities. They continued to do so in the period at hand, with Dutch merchants and painters alike taking a hand in the trade.73 The most obvious need was for a range of paints, pigments, gums, and solvents which were unobtainable, or obtainable only in poorer quality or limited quantity, in England itself. Many stranger-painters could still count on their accustomed sources of supply from the old country, and they sometimes even acted as importers for others. Brushes were another such valued commodity. Those imported from abroad were prized above those produced in England.74 The earliest of these importers in the period at hand may well have been the limner Lucas Horenbout (d.1544), son of Gerard, and a successful limner in his own right, who was supplying brushes to painters at Whitehall by 1531.75 As a limner, Lucas will have imported the fine brushes known as pensils or pencils, made of animal fur bound together and inserted into goose quills.76 Joining the ranks of native manufacturers, a number of strangers were 71

Richard Haydocke, A Tracte containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge, Carving & Buildinge (1598), which was a translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattoro dell’arte pittura, sculptura, ed architettura (1584). 72 The definitive work is Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration. The awareness and even collection of continental prints extended far into provincial England as well: Robert Tittler and Anne Thackray, ‘Print Collecting in Provincial England Prior to 1650: The Randle Holme Album’, British Art Journal, 9:2 (Autumn, 2008), 3–11. 73 See, for example, Wendy Childs, ‘Painters’ Materials’, in Jo Kirby, Susie Nash, and Joanna Cannon (eds), Trade in Artists’ Materials: Markets and Commerce in Europe to 1700 (2010), 29–41; T.S. Willan, Studies in Elizabethan Foreign Trade (Manchester, 1959) 70, 77, 74, 75, 77, 81; R.W.K. Hinton (ed.), The Port Books of Boston, 1601–1640, Lincolnshire Record Society, 50 (1956), 229, 234, 243; and Brian Dietz (ed.), The Port and Trade of Early Elizabethan London: Documents (1972), items 18, 210, 154, 389, 465. 74 Professor Alan Nelson has retrieved from the parish registers of St Olave’s Southwark (LMA MS. P71/0LA/009) the identities of nearly fifty brushmakers working in Southwark alone between 1583 and 1606, virtually all of them with English sounding names, though this will have included those who manufactured many more types of brushes than would be used by painters. I am most grateful to Professor Nelson for this information. 75 Susan Foister, ‘Lucas Horenbout’, ODNB. 76 Ria Fabri, ‘“Eenen ramenant van verf ende pinselen”: Some Aspects of the Materials used by Seventeenth-Century Cabinet Painters in Antwerp’, in Kirby et al., Trade in Artists’ Materials, 372 and ‘Glossary’, 449.

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denizened as brushmakers in the reign of Elizabeth, including Arnold Elson, Peter Lulle, and Hubert Vanderkell from the Low Countries and Kathren Pepes from Paris, while the Frenchman recorded as John de Horse (probably Jean d’Ours) was admitted to the Stationers’ Company as a brushmaker and seller of pictures in 1550. He was still at work in 1585.77 Wood panels were another highly sought-after import. Though some were produced in England throughout the period at hand, imported wood panels and, later, canvas, were particularly coveted by English painters. The quality of a wood panel depended on the quality of its finishing and sizing. Those processes in turn largely depended on the alignment of its grain: the straighter the grain, the easier to split into even panels and then to smooth and prepare the surface for paint thereafter. The preferred wood for panels was always oak, which was durable and yet easily riven. The vast majority of paintings done before the use of canvas became common in the early seventeenth century were done on oak panel. But for the fussy painter, not just any oak would do. English oaks tended to grow singly in open areas, with lots of space for branches to spread off from the main trunk and a good deal of sunlight, all of which encouraged horizontal growth, twisted branches, and crooked grains. The oaks of the eastern Baltic, by contrast, grew in thick copses where they had to reach high and straight to catch the light, all of which made for easily riven, straight grained planks and then boards. Once riven from felled trees, the planks were processed into panels in a series of stages, coated with a fish-based glue, chalk ground, and then often a primer of white lead immersed in oil before being sized and primed.78 These latter stages were often completed in Dutch cities, especially Antwerp, and then the panels were shipped to London and other English ports. Those involved in the shipping were also likely to be Dutch merchants, or émigré Dutch painters whose continued connections with the home country allowed them a leg up on this valuable trade. Much to their credit, many strangers made efforts to assimilate, prove their loyalty, and get on with their lives in their new nation. Those who settled permanently made the most strenuous efforts. Over the course of time, as Andrew Pettegree has shown, more strangers began to list native English men and sometimes women in their wills: a sign of growing trust and even intimacy expressed at the most soul-searching time of life.79 Those who did so 77 Kirk and Kirk, Return of Aliens, II, 309; England’s Immigrants database, www. Englandsimmigrants.com, vide de Horse. 78 See, for example, Ian Tyers, ‘Panel Making: Sources of Wood, Construction, “Trademarks”, and Conclusions on their Production and Trade in Britain’, in Painting in Britain, ed. T. Cooper et al., pp. 106–15; Baker, English Panel Painting, pp. 105–8. 79 Andrew Pettegree, ‘“Thirty Years On”: Progress towards Integration amongst the Immigrant Population of Elizabethan London’, in English Rural Society: Essays in Honour of Jan Thirsk, ed. J. Chartres and D. Hey (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 297–312. See also Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in the Early Stuart Court: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars (Leiden, 1989) pp. 27–33, 43–72.

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will have learned the language and come more frequently to attend English churches. Some widowed migrant-painters like Pengrace Inglishe (fl.1543– post-1580) found their second wives amongst the native English population.80 And eventually, a generation or so down the road, names became anglicized as well, so that, for example, Remigius Hogenburg (fl.1536–89) became Remigius Highhill, and Marcus Gheeraerts the younger (c. 1561–1636) became Mark Garrett. Over the same course of time, and whilst many of the stranger-painters found employment largely with their fellow countrymen and remained isolated from native English painters, some managed to join and work with them. This would certainly have pertained amongst the more prominent stranger-painters of the day, including men like Toto and Lyzard in the mid-sixteenth century, and Jan de Critz the elder (c.1551–1642) in the latter years, whose roles as SergeantPainters allowed them effectively to encourage such diversity.81 As the example of the more obscure Daniel Popeler (d. post-1604) shows, it could happen amongst others as well. Popeler, also known as Papeler, Poupler, and Popelere, was born in Hainault, the son of the painter Anthony Popeler, and was brought to London as an infant sometime around 1568. His father appears to have kept his own personal and occupational activities within the Dutch émigré community, and will have trained Daniel within that same milieu. But Daniel successfully breached those confines, becoming well integrated into the city and its native English painting community. He became one of the circle of friends and associates surrounding Robert Peake, and enjoyed a close friendship with the Painter-Stainer John Kelsey, who left him a legacy in his 1589 will. The year 1595 found Popeler decorating Clothworkers’ Hall along with John Knight the younger and Robert Bridgewell. By 1604 he was assigned to supervise a group of lesser-skilled English painters who had been signed on to paint some of the woodwork on the triumphal arch being constructed by the Dutch community to mark the accession of James I. As his assistant, he took on none other than the young Rowland Buckett, who would become one of the leading decorative painters of his age.82 Popeler has not made it into anything like the canon of English Renaissance Art, nor should the meagre legacy of his work earn him such a place. But whilst the substantial divide between the stranger and native English painters took a long time to disappear, careers

80

Town, ‘A Biographical Directory’, 113. Native English painters continued to predominate, but some strangers were also employed throughout the period at hand, making the King’s Works an early and sustained point of contact. Auerbach, Tudor Artists, passim. 82 Gervase Hood, ‘The Netherlandic Community in London and Patronage of Painters and Architects in Early Stuart London’, in Dutch and Flemish Artists, ed. Roding et al., p. 49 and n. 29; Gervase Hood, ‘A Netherlandish Triumphal Arch for James I’, in Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Biography of Britain and the Low Countries, ed. Susan Roach (1991), p. 78; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 157. 81

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like his helped nudge at least some native English painters to overcome their isolation from continental techniques. Popeler’s implicit role in bridging that divide was nowhere more visible than in his involvement with the Dutch triumphal arch of 1604: the single most public and spectacular gesture of the Dutch artistic community towards its adopted country (see Fig. 4). The practice of triumphal arches to mark the entrance of newly crowned monarchs to the City of London borrowed heavily from continental practice, but it also had some English antecedents. Such an arch had served to commemorate the entrance of Elizabeth, though the stranger communities did not, as a group, participate in its construction. By 1603 the Netherlandish community had grown in size and confidence. In a welcome gesture of recognition (and no doubt in the hope of passing on some of the costs involved) the City government allowed two of the seven planned arches of March 1604 to be constructed by stranger communities. Along with the Italians, who proceeded to build an arch as well, London’s Dutch community gloried in the challenge.83 The invitation to participate came at a time of renewed animosity amongst some of the native English population towards foreigners in their midst. This was directed especially towards merchants but also towards artisans like painters. It was induced in part by a wave of new migrants following the sack of Antwerp in 1585,84 and punctuated by anti-alien legislation at least entered into Parliament in 1589.85 Mounting pressure led the government to undertake a new survey of aliens in 1593.86 In addition, and though planning for the arch was well underway by then, the Hampton Court Conference of January 1604 dashed the hopes of the Dutch Calvinist settlers that the new religious settlement would veer in their direction. Coming at such a perilous juncture, the offer to construct an arch offered the community a fortuitous opportunity to express its loyalty to the Crown and nation, and to do so in the most public manner. Its creators also used the project to showcase the classical grounding and artistic skills of its writers and painters. They hoped thereby to illustrate their ability to bring those talents to the new king’s service. In addition, the refinement of the whole also encouraged a greater appreciation of classical forms both to the public at large and to English craftsmen.

83

A virulent outbreak of plague in London had caused James’s ceremonial entry to be postponed until a year after his accession. Hood, ‘A Netherlandish Triumphal Arch’, pp. 67–82. 84 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 548–9; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, p. 217. 85 David Dean, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliaments of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 222–3. 86 Irene Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis, 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639, Huguenot Society Publications, 57 (1985), Introduction.

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Fig. 4. The Dutch Triumphal Arch for the Entry of James I (1604).

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With these goals in mind, the community enlisted the services of Dutch writers, printers, designers, and painters to produce an ornate confection of classical iconography and text. Some participants were already part of the expatriate community in London; others were brought over from the Netherlands or simply commissioned (as was the eminent Zeeland printer Richard Schilders of Middlesburg) to do their work at home and send it over. Along with Martin Droeshout (1573/4–1642),87 who was already resident in London, and Popeler,88 contributing painters included Daniel de Vos (1568– 1625) and Paulus van Overbeeke (c. 1530/31–post-1604),89 brought over from Antwerp with their assistants for that commission, and Adrian van Son (fl.c. 1580–1610) from Scotland.90 Its several large-scale paintings prominently depicted James’s putative forebears amongst kings both biblical and historical, while heavily classical texts sought further to place him in a grand pantheon of peace-makers and intellectuals. The edifice as a whole offered a lavish display of classical architectural forms which, though still largely unfamiliar to the general English public, must surely have tickled the vanity of a king who thought himself the Solomon of his age. In all these respects, the Dutch arch stood out amongst the six others, five of them native English in design and construction, in its inspiration and construction, its classical vocabulary, in the large scale of its figurative paintings, and of course in its production by Dutch artists and writers.91 This grand gesture will have built on the reputation for sophisticated artistry which foreigners in general and Netherlanders in particular had already established in at least some quarters of English society. Aside from the extensive commissions which continued to fall their way from the more sophisticated and affluent patrons, that recognition had been articulated by intellectuals and other painters alike. Nicholas Hilliard, for example, spoke for many when he noted that ‘Of truth, all the rare siences especially the arts of Carving, Painting, Goldsmith, [and] Imbroderers, together with the most of all the liberall siences came first unto us from the Strangers, and generally they are the best, and most in number’.92 87 LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS005667/001/112 and see by dates; Hood, ‘A Netherlandish Triumphal Arch’, p. 78. For Droeshout’s other work and presumed engraving of Shakespeare’s first folio, see June Schlueter, ‘Martin Droeshout Redivivus: Reassessing the Folio Engraving of Shakespeare’, Shakespeare Survey, 60 (2007), 237–51; Mary Edmond, ‘It was for Gentle Shakespeare Cut’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 339–44; Christiaan Schuckman, ‘The Engraver of the First Folio Portrait of William Shakespeare’, Print Quarterly, 8 (1991), 40–3. 88 Hood, ‘A Netherlandish Triumphal Arch’, p. 78. 89 Town, ‘ A Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 72, 182; RKD database, https://rkd.nl/explore/ artists, vide Pauwels Overbeeck. 90 Hood, ‘A Netherlandish Triumphal Arch’, p. 78. 91 Ibid., pp. 67–82. 92 Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning (c. 1600), ed. A.F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston, Massachusetts, 1983), p. 19.

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Hilliard’s observation would become ever more dramatically apt in the succeeding years. Though James himself had no particularly well-developed eye for painting, those around him, including his cosmopolitan and refined consort Anne of Denmark, the duke of Buckingham, and the earl and countess of Arundel, brought English connoisseurship and a classically informed appreciation of visual culture to unprecedented heights. That interest, as is well known, became virtually obsessive under Charles I, and it came at a most fortuitous time in the development of both the style and abundance of continental, and especially Dutch, painting. The painters’ craft had always been more advanced and more substantially supported in the Low Countries than anywhere else in transalpine Europe. By the opening years of the seventeenth century it may be said that, despite the almost constant warfare ensuing before the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–21), that refined, cosmopolitan, and affluent population had created a mass market for painting and similar crafts. By 1650 it is reliably estimated that two and a half million paintings had been produced there. Driven by that demand, Dutch painters, organized in and supported by city guilds which were much more powerful than their English counterparts, rose innovatively to the occasion. Even from the fifteenth century, Dutch craft guilds and city governments had been more proactive in marketing, developing auctions, and providing spaces for public displays of their wares. Encouraged by that support, Dutch painters experimented with forms of mass production: the specialization of function within particular workshops, the use of templates, the emphasis on copying from one painting to another, the concentration on particular subject genres, and even the encouragement of painting styles marked by the quick application of broad brush strokes.93 None of these innovations would translate completely to the English scene even by 1640, but they certainly had their impact. For one, the virtual mass production of paintings provided a surplus for export, providing a ready supply of relatively cheap paintings for the English market and fierce competition for the English painter. The influx of Dutch paintings appears to have driven prices down for all but the works of the very elite court painters of the day. It introduced and then popularized genre paintings, seascapes, and landscapes which were absent from the Englishman’s traditional repertoire. It left most native English painters to concentrate largely on decorative works, arms painting, and portraiture of what was seen as an unfashionable and inferior sort. Secondly, the vast increase in the number of trained painters in the major Dutch cities also produced something of a surplus of skilled labour. By the 1620s and 1630s, myriad Dutch painters travelled all over Europe, serving 93

Succinctly summarized in Israel, The Dutch Republic, pp. 555–64 and Maarten Prak, ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Art Market During the Dutch Golden Age’, in S.R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (eds), Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 143–71 and especially pp. 145–53.

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one aristocratic clientele after another for months or years at a time before moving on. Few of them seem to have considered England their most favoured destination, yet their comings and goings still amounted to a constant flow in and out of English aristocratic patronage. Their travels may have been prompted by continued political and religious turmoil back home, but many came now as economic opportunists. Some, like Abraham van Blijenberch (1575/6–1624),94 Adriaen Hannemann (1604–71),95 Robert van Voerst (1597– 1636),96 or the Frenchman Jean Petitot (1607–91),97 were brought in to assist the better-established foreign masters of the era. A great many others, including men like Alexander Keyrnix (1600–52),98 Abraham van Diepenbeck (1596 or 1599–1675),99 and Cornelius van Poehlenburg (1594–1667),100 were set to work producing high quality copies of continentally produced works for courtly or other affluent connoisseurs. And still others, men like Jan Torrentius,101 and 94

Van Blijenberch worked for both Paul von Somer and Daniel Mytens before returning to the Low Countries. Christopher Brown, ‘British Paintings and the Low Countries, 1530–1630’, in Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), p. 27; Karen Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman and Gardener (2005), p. 27; Heinz Archive, painters’ files, vide Blijenberch; ODNB, vide Blijenberch, Abraham van; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 101; Stefanie Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, p. 156; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 178. 95 Hannemann may have worked for Mytens and did work for Van Dyck at the latter’s Blackfriars workshop. ODNB, vide Hanneman, Adriaen. 96 Michele Lynn Frederick, ‘Shaping the Royal Image: Gerrit Van Honthorst and the Stuart Courts in London and the Hague, 1620–1649’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Delaware, 2019), pp. 304–5, 308; RKD database, https://rkd.nl/explore/artists, vide Van Voerst. I am grateful to Dr Frederick for permission to cite her thesis. 97 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, pp. 197–201; Waterhouse, Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters, p. 216; Daphne Foskett (ed.), A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, pp. 446–7; Baron de Schickler, Les Eglises du Refuge en Angleterre (3 vols, Paris, 1892), II, p. 8 and n.3. 98 Waterhouse, The Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters, p. 48; John Harris, The Artist and the Country House (1979), p. 11; Wright et al., British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections, p. 476; Helen Smailes (ed.), The Concise Catalogue of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 98; Col. Maurice Harold Grant, A Dictionary of British Landscape Painters from the 16th Century to the early 20th Century (Leigh-on-Sea, 1952), p. 108; Historical Manuscripts Commission: Report on the Laing Manuscripts Preserved at the University of Edinburgh, I (1914), p. 249. 99 National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Diepenbeck, Abraham; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, pp. 169–70; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, p. 165; Grant, A Dictionary of British Landscape Painters, p. 57; Fr Marc Lindejer, SJ, ‘Lost: Forty Stained-Glass Windows from Antwerp’, Vidimus, 123, unpaginated. 100 Van Poehlenburgh painted background scenes for Hendrick Steenwyck, was admired by Rubens, and worked directly for Charles I from 1638. Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers, p. 329; Brown, ‘British Painting and the Low Countries’, p. 27; Harris, The Artist and the Country House, 11; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, pp. 175–6; Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, p. 252. 101 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, p. 176; Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, p. 273.

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the marine painter Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (1562 or 1566–1640),102 were recruited by wealthy and powerful English patrons, often to produce specific works. Their reception had the same effect as the paintings which they produced, and they left most English painters in the dust. Though a few native English painters, including Hilliard and Robert Peake (both of whom died in 1619), had managed to remain in the mix through the 1610s, few could match the Dutch painters with their classical education, continental training in several visual media, established reputations, and myriad influential connections. Identifying and recruiting the best of contemporary continental painters became one of the unofficial roles of Charles’s ambassadors and of Englishmen seeking favour at court. The English-born but Dutch-trained Cornelius Johnson and the Dutchman Daniel Mytens may have dominated the scene into the mid-1620s, but even they paled before the arrival of Van Dyck intermittently from 1620, Gerritt van Honthorst in 1628, or Rubens in 1629. Though some stayed on but briefly, they and others like them established a standard of aesthetic achievement, and a pattern of foreign recruitment, with which it was difficult to compete. Van Honthorst left after less than a year, only to serve as the court painter of Charles’s sister Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia. Mytens folded his tents and returned abroad in 1630. Johnson remained in England until 1643. But the flow of talented and well-regarded stranger-painters into English courtly circles nevertheless remained constant right up until the collapse of aristocratic patronage, and then of the monarchy itself, in the 1640s. Even at the quotidian level of the working journeyman or small master painter, it was hard to escape the native English admiration, however begrudging, for the stranger-painters. Many of these strangers had been well established in their home countries, members and sometimes masters of their respective guilds in places like Antwerp, Bruges, Ghent, and, especially after 1585, Amsterdam. Many had already travelled widely through the courts of both northern and southern Europe, accepting commissions and observing at close hand the work of Italians, French, and others. Most were multi-lingual and multi-skilled, and had well-established continental connections with the merchants and the suppliers of items essential to their trade. Some of the more prominent had already worked for or sold paintings to English aristocratic patrons on tour before even coming to England. Others, like George Geldorp (1595–1665)103

102 Waterhouse, Dictionary, p. 288; Walpole, Anecdotes, p. 94; Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler, pp. 283–4; Grant, A Dictionary of British Landscape Painters, p. 208; RKD database, https://rkd.nl/explore/artists, vide Vroom. 103 Geldorp began as a painter, coming to England in 1623, colouring in outlines drawn by others and eventually gaining court patronage, but he dealt in paintings as well. ODNB, vide Geldorp, George; National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Geldorp, George; John Bruce (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I, VIII, 1635 (1865), p. 592; LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/28; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, p. 208; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, p. 174; National Portrait

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or Nicholas Lanier (1588–1666),104 settled into London and dealt in imported paintings. In sum, though numerous stranger-painters viewed England as a convenient port in a raging storm and quickly left when domestic turbulence subsided or better offers beckoned, others stayed on at least into the 1640s and sometimes after. The most visible and spectacular evidence of their success came at the very pinnacle of the profession, with the lavish patronage extended at the Caroline court and its celebration of figures like Rubens and Van Dyck. These celebrity painters came as invited guests rather than as economic migrants or religious refugees and were therefore exempted from some of the restrictions imposed on their lesser-known countrymen. Their success spearheaded a somewhat greater acceptance of stranger-painters in general, first at the highest levels of English society and then eventually amongst the wider public which had emerged for the consumption of portraiture. Yet the road to the recognition or assimilation was never entirely smooth. The natural tendency of newcomers to stick to their own kind and of native Englishmen to look askance at them, retarded the pace of both social and occupational assimilation. Other factors worked to the same end. Even if legal barriers had not discouraged such an exchange, many of the strangers came and went before their native counterparts had much of a chance to interact with them or to learn from them. Many of them worked exclusively in those aristocratic households, or in the workshops of other strangers, to which native painters had little access. Then, too, continuing resistance amongst the wider public lingered through the era. It may have risen and fallen in its intensity over time, depending on such factors as England’s relations with other European powers and with the successive waves of migration stemming from war and religious prosecution, but it never disappeared. Instead, a delicate balance long ensued in both the public perception and in the law itself. On the one hand, native English painters could only overcome the growing demand for the more refined, classically inspired, continentally derived craftsmanship by learning from their new neighbours. At least in theory, such interchange seems most likely to have transpired in the King’s Works and the Revels where members of the two communities worked side by side. Yet the surviving records of those bodies suggest such intermittent employment and such rapid turnover in personnel that close and enduring contacts may not have

Gallery, ‘British Picture Restorers, 1600– 1950’, www.npg.org.uk/research.programmes/ directory-of-picture-restorers.php.’ (2nd edn, March, 2016), vide Geldorp. 104 The multi-talented Lanier was known more as a musician than as a painter, enjoying appointment as Master of the King’s Music under Charles I and the notoriety which came with such a post at court. But in his sundry trips to Europe he collected paintings for himself and purchased them for Charles I. ODNB, vide Lanier, Nicholas; Edmond, ‘Limners and Picturemakers’, pp. 75–6.

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had a chance to flourish. In the end, the strangers’ economic competition and sheer ‘otherness’ stubbornly spoke for restriction and regulation. The ensuing thicket of barriers, imposed by company custom, local ordinance, parliamentary statute, and royal proclamation, theoretically applied to all strangers, but resistance to all but the elite amongst the stranger-painters themselves emanated especially from the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London.

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3 The Painter-Stainers’ Company of London Not all those Londoners who painted for a living in this era were members of a guild, much less of the Painter-Stainers’ Company with its statutory jurisdiction within the City and four miles around. Yet the Company nicely exemplifies the pressures placed upon painters in general, and especially in London, in this period. Its activities and concerns reflect those of individual painters and of painters’ guilds elsewhere as well as in the metropolis. The prominence of that Company, and of London itself, makes it a very useful place to begin a consideration of native English painters of this era. Few Company records exist from before 1623, when the first surviving minute book of its ruling body, the Court of Assistants, begins.1 But few of the Company’s numerous concerns recorded in that book were new at that time, so that the minute book offers a finer grained description of activities and organization which had been ongoing for some time. Like most companies, the Painter-Stainers were sensitive to the pressures which threatened to disrupt traditional activities and goals both from within and without. The effectiveness of any guild or livery company – the term applied to London guilds of this era – seeking to uphold its reputation and sustain its authority rested on several pillars. The protection of its members’ interests of an economic and, to a degree, civic and social, nature loomed as the sine qua non of any company’s operation. That protection included the maintenance of sufficient fraternal bonds amongst members to ensure their loyalty and active participation. Such bonding activities extended to the mediation of disputes amongst members, to the provision of alms and other services for the less fortunate members and their families, and to a ritual programme of commensality and ceremony engineered to foster fraternal harmony. Along with those goals, companies had forcefully to establish and maintain standards of craftsmanship so as to protect the reputation of the whole. They did this especially by ensuring the proper training of apprentices and by exercising the power of search against shoddy or fraudulent work. Failure to carry out these responsibilities could bring an entire occupation into disrepute. Each livery and guild experienced and dealt with these concerns in its own ways. The Painter-Stainers’ were no different. A company which maintained its corporate strength by these means made strong claims on the loyalty of its members and their deference to its leadership. 1 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Court Minute Book, 1623–49’, I, LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/ MS05667/001 (hereafter cited as ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’).

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The threat to such interests came from many directions, of which the presence of the stranger-painters was certainly one. Strangers were not entirely barred from the freemanry or from guild membership, though even as non-freemen they were legally subject to company search and obliged to pay quarterage fees to their corresponding companies. Some liveries took them on, but they were not well received or often admitted by the Painter-Stainers. Yet, as we have seen, many of them nevertheless did paint for a living, either enjoying the protection of well-placed patrons, paying quarterly fees to the Company for permission to do so, or simply freelancing, especially after dark, as best they could. Sundry native English craftsmen from other trades, especially plasterers and masons along with heralds and their deputies in the College of Arms, also painted as part of their own work and were therefore viewed by the painters as interlopers. Still others, including failed apprentices, journeymen, and some small householders, scrambled for any work they could find, including elements of the painters’ trade. Most such people made easy targets for search and prosecution. Yet the frequency with which they were detected and challenged shows how widespread their activity remained throughout the era. Along with sundry members of the building trades, and in stark contrast to such more specialized craftsmen as, for example, spectacle makers, goldsmiths, or clockmakers, non-freemen who painted could often manage to get by in this era with a modicum of skill and little training. But at a time when something as simple as the whitewashing of church walls constituted a common form of employment, such workers provided constant competition for the legitimate painter’s lowest paying and entry level employment. It was also alleged that they threatened the reputation of the whole trade by producing sub-standard work. This is not to imply that non-freemen had any monopoly on shoddy work. Freemen painters themselves sometimes fell short of the mark as well, compelling the Company to maintain regular searches and to deal with members thought to be letting down the side by their negligence or incompetence. Especially after the Statute of Artificers of 1563 (5 Eliz., c.4), those who carried out a trade without the required seven-year apprenticeship were liable to prosecution. Freemen Painter-Stainers whose work fell short of the mark could be fined, have their work seized, and made to re-do the work to the Company’s satisfaction. Under the terms of the statute non-freemen interlopers, with whom fraternal mediation had little effect, were more likely to be brought to court. Over the decades at hand the Company’s claim to control two genres of painting proved particularly contentious, providing near constant friction and frequent litigation. Whether native English or foreign-trained, the ‘picturemakers’, as portrait-painters were commonly known, formed one contentious group. The arms painters, and the practice of arms painting itself, represented the other, bringing the Painter-Stainers into constant conflict with the heralds and the College of Arms. Some ‘picture-makers’ and most arms painters working in the London area might be found within the ranks of the Painter-Stainers’ Company. Those working outside the Company were seen as competitors. 56

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Many stranger-painters had both training and experience in painting arms in their home countries, but those employed for arms painting in England were almost always native Englishmen. ‘Picture-makers’ (alternatively ‘picturedrawers’) included both native English and non-English painters. Yet the two groups were distinguished by much more than birth and language. Most of the former worked in the insular and often regional traditions of the English vernacular. Most long remained uninformed by the theoretical concepts, classical learning, or particularly refined techniques which many of the strangerpainters brought to their work. London Painter-Stainers admired the skills of a Holbein, a Eworth, a Mytens, or (in the last decades of the era) a Van Dyck or a Rubens. They treated such celebrated court painters with deference and respect. But most others were viewed as competitors and even prosecuted for their perceived transgressions upon Company privilege. In facing these myriad challenges the Company’s leadership came from its Court of Assistants, senior liverymen all, and from the two wardens and one master chosen annually from their ranks. The Assistants had numbered only three or four men at the merger of the Painters and the Stainers in 1502, but their number grew steadily through the era. It had risen to twelve by the early 1570s, to sixteen or more by the time of the Company’s Charter of 1581 and its Ordinances of the following year.2 By 1638 the total compliment of the Livery, comprising the senior members of the Company and including the Assistants but not the yeomanry, journeymen, or apprentices, had reached fifty.3 These numbers alone tell us that, despite its challenges, the Company must have being doing something right to stay so successfully afloat over this longue durée. Yet merely to conclude that the Company remained active and viable in the era at hand here is not to address most of the important questions one has come to ask about London liveries in general or this Company in particular. It is also to overlook the structure and the dynamics of that Company’s operation, and of the occupation of painting itself, in what proves to have been a malleable and protean chapter in its history. It remains to ask what factors contributed to that success, how the Company met the challenges of changing times, and whether it and other liveries maintained their relevance in an era of early capitalist free enterprise. The ensuing discussion proceeds in several parts. It begins with considerations of the origins and structure of the Company, and of its membership. It then turns to those factors, both formal and informal, which 2 Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005), p. 33 [Hereafter Borg, Painter-Stainers]; City of London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix (4 vols, 1884), III, pp. 615–16. 3 The Company Clerk Richard Bryan initially recorded the first effort at this division on 12 October 1638, with two lists of twenty-four and twenty-five members respectively, plus the master and two wardens appended to each list, for a total of fifty-two in all. But he crossed this out and replaced it with an almost identical list, and division, in the Court’s next meeting. ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, 134 and 136. The number of those below the ranks of Assistants, known as ‘the yeomanry’, remains obscure.

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helped to preserve the integrity of the whole before concluding with a consideration of the Company’s continuing relevance. Though the Painters, if not yet the Painter-Stainers, were thought by an Elizabethan MP to have existed only as far back as the reign of Edward III (1327–77),4 they had actually gained their first grant of ordinances in 1283.5 A second defining document came in the form of a series of ordinances ratified by an inspeximus issued by the mayor and aldermen of the City of London on 4 July 1466.6 That document recognized the authenticity, and thus gave legal force, to the Painters’ assertion of their rights and privileges. Though it was neither a charter of incorporation nor issued by the Crown, the inspeximus described and affirmed what the Painters had long considered to be their own privileges. Those privileges included the right to elect a master and two wardens on the feast day of St Luke, the patron saint of painters. The document authenticated the numerous governing functions which those officials exercised over their brethren: the right to fine members for non-attendance at meetings or for other breaches of protocol, and to collect the various fees and amercements due the Company under particular circumstances. Several of its provisions described the appropriate standards for painting itself, so that the reputation of the whole could be staked out and upheld. They affirmed the authority to search for shoddy work and to fine those who produced it. An additional grant of 1481 reinforced the Company’s powers of search, about which more will be said below, and it conferred the right to retain half the fines and forfeitures assessed for defective work identified in those searches.7 These documents served well enough until such time as the Painters required more authority and a greater legal presence in dealing with competition from both foreigners and native English craftsmen. By 1502 its leaders came to see both economic and political advantages to merging with the smaller guild of Stainers, and so they banded together in that year with the latter to form a single company.8 Their decision to do so may in part have been prompted, or at least inspired, by the royal patronage on offer on the occasion of Prince Arthur’s elaborate funeral in that same year. It will also no doubt have been encouraged, as we’ve seen in a previous chapter, by the need to stand up against Henry VII’s 4 So argued the barrister and MP Hayward Townshend in defending the Company’s interests in the Parliament of 1601, as cited in P.W. Hasler (ed.), History of Parliament Trust: The House of Commons, 1558–1603 (3 vols, 1981), III, pp. 516–17. 5 George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (4th edn, 1963), p. 86; W.A.D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers Company of London (1923), pp. 14–17. 6 Englefield, History of the Painter-Stainers Company, pp. 36–9; printed in full in City of London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III, pp. 613–14. 7 Petition of 5 June, 1481, in Reginald Sharpe (ed.), The Calendar of Letter Books Preserved amongst the Archives of the Corporation of the City of London at the Guildhall (1912), fol. 160. 8 Englefield, History of the Painter-Stainers, pp. 46–8.

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preference for stranger-painters to carry out at least some of the Crown’s requirements. For their part, the small company of Stainers (craftsmen who painted or stained on cloth), which enjoyed little clout in City affairs or elsewhere, will have seen this as an opportunity for greater influence, empowerment, and financial resources. Both crafts will have benefitted by sharing the costs of ceremonial and other occasions which came to weigh heavily on such organizations. Yet the most immediately pressing factor may well have been the receipt of a charter by the Plasterers’ Company in 1501.9 Painters and Stainers simply had to keep pace with their closest occupational rivals, and they did so by pressing for their own charter in the following year. Overall, those who led the move towards amalgamation will have seen its value in protecting the monopolies which each traditionally strove to enjoy. Though the Painters were the predominant component from the very beginning, efforts were made to give equal representation at the top by rotating the office of master from one to the other component. But with the diminished role of Stainers and their craft after the Reformation, this eventually proved unworkable. Painters predominated ever after. From the outset, the Company’s master, two wardens, and Court of Assistants constituted ‘the Livery’, also known as ‘the clothing’. Other categories of membership, ranging from journeymen up through the ranks of the householders who will have constituted the ‘yeomanry’,10 are said to have brought the entire compliment to some 200 members by 1578.11 These instruments of Company governance served well until the early Elizabethan period, when a number of factors led to a quest for still greater authority. While by no means a new phenomenon, the threat of encroachment by others on the painters’ metier had by then become even more intense. In an age of sustained, even dramatic, population growth, the building trades in general expanded to meet accelerating demand for domestic housing, while institutional building of several kinds were also experiencing steady expansion. Though not, strictly speaking, considered one of those building trades, painters benefitted from the same expanded opportunities. At the same time they faced keener competition as less skilled workers, easily able to evade local labour restrictions, flooded into the city and its suburbs in search of work. London had also become a powerful magnet for economic migrants and religious refugees from continental Europe. As we have seen, skilled workers, painters amongst 9 Charter of the Plasterers’ Company of London, 10 March 1501, City of London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III, p. 659. 10 Yeomen appear least often of all ranks in the surviving documents of the Company, receiving only the very occasional mention. As a formal body, the yeomanry had by the 1620s the right to make nominations to the offices of Warden and Master, but the full extent of their role in this as well as other companies of the day remains obscure. LGL, ‘PainterStainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 3, 54, and 152; Englefield, History of the Painter-Stainers, p. 78. 11 The Company cited this number in its 1578 petition to Lord Burghley, and probably excluded apprentices therefrom. TNA, SP 12/125/28 (16 July 1578).

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them, found it a congenial refuge from religious conflict which remained endemic on the continent throughout most of the era. These broad concerns, along with the fear of unrest which they were thought to encourage, preoccupied authorities at every level of governance through the mid-century and beyond. The Crown’s emerging strategy to prevent disorder was to identify and empower what Paul Slack and Peter Clark have memorably termed ‘small knots of reliable men’ to keep a handle on things in their own locales and jurisdictions.12 This strategy of delegation became enshrined in the dramatic mid-century proliferation of borough charters of incorporation,13 in the poor relief efforts pioneered in urban centres like, for example, Norwich and Salisbury,14 and in legislation like the Statute of Artificers of 1563.15 Though this longest statute of the sixteenth century addressed a number of related issues, its emphasis on serving a seven-year apprenticeship as a pre-condition for employment in a particular craft or industry proved especially important, as did its efforts to regulate the terms of apprenticeship and employment within particular crafts.16 It strove to preserve standards of production and to tie workers to their craft and to its regulatory authority for the course of their working life. It did so by giving various guilds and, in London, livery companies greater control over their members and over their eponymous occupations. Guilds could also now more effectively mediate between their occupation and the governing authorities of town, city, and nation. It was in this context in November 1575 that the Painter-Stainers’ leadership petitioned the Queen for further powers of redress against unlicensed painters. They claimed that the shoddy and incompetent work produced by these interlopers had not only brought slander to their occupation, but a ‘great decay’ to all workmanship, thereby discouraging young men from entering the trade and putting honest painters into penury.17 Their petition led in August 1576 to the drafting of a bill in Parliament which would have granted a full charter of incorporation.18 12

Peter Clark and Paul Slack, Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (1972), p. 22. Robert Tittler, ‘The Incorporation of Boroughs, c.1540–1560’, History, 62:204 (Feb., 1977), 24–42. 14 John Pound, ‘An Elizabethan Census of the Poor: The Treatment of Vagrancy in Norwich, 1570–1580’, Birmingham University Historical Journal, VIII (1962), 135–51 and Pound, The Norwich Census of the Poor, 1570, Norfolk Record Society, 40 (1971); Paul Slack, ‘Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597–1666’, in Crisis and Order, ed. Clark and Slack, pp. 164–203 and Slack, Poverty in Early Stuart Salisbury, Wiltshire Record Society, 31 (1976), and, for a succinct summary, John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy in Tudor England (1971), pp. 60–8. 15 The ‘Statute of Artificers’, 5 Eliz., c.4. 16 Eliz., c.4, especially paragraph 24. 17 Petition of the Painter-Stainers to the Queen, 15 November, 1575, BL, Lansdowne MS 20, fol. 22r. 18 BL, Lansdowne MS 22, fol. 120r–v. Though not unprecedented, this was not the usual means of seeking such a charter, but the Company must have found it the most expeditious way at the time. 13

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Despite the leisurely and markedly amiable note on which that Parliament came to an end,19 the bill somehow never made it through. Yet its consideration did raise the issue at the highest levels. Another petition soon followed, this one addressed to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, in July, 1578. It specifically addressed the newly asserted claims of the heralds, as officers of the College of Arms, to control the painting of arms. The Painter-Stainers had long taken arms painting for part of their bread and butter, and those rival claims directly challenged what they considered their ancient right and practice. Taken together, these concerns and initiatives finally led to the grant of a full charter of incorporation, issued to the Company in 1581.20 Like most charters of incorporation, this one granted the Company the right to possess property in mortmain, to sue and be sued, to create its own by-laws, and to operate as a corporate body in perpetual succession. It gave greater legal weight to the Company’s right to search for shoddy work, to fine those found to have produced it, and to share the proceeds of such fines with the city. It also gave the Company the power to carry out its own enforcement of the apprenticeship laws as stipulated by the Statute of Artificers. This meant that, with some notable exceptions, no one could legally practise the trade of painting unless they had undergone a successful apprenticeship of at least seven years or paid quarterage fees to the Company for the right to do so. All these powers and authorities were to apply to the Company’s jurisdiction in the City of London and the surrounding four miles. But as individual Painter-Stainers frequently accepted commissions and carried out work well outside the London area, the Company’s powers were influential elsewhere as well. The Company acted quickly to build upon these restated powers by creating a ‘book’ of thirty-seven by-laws or ordinances, most of which remained in operation for a long time to come. The Ordinances, as they became known, were certified by the Crown in January 1582, and given additional force by a commission of judges and privy councillors in that same year.21 The Crown’s support fit nicely into its overall strategy of delegating authority to local officials, though in this case these officials were occupational rather than municipal. The Ordinances offer us a unique insight into the Company’s operation, and thus to the nature and requirements of the trade itself as it pertained particularly to the London area.

19

J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments, I, 1559–1581 (London and New York, 1958), pp. 305–12. 20 July 1581. City of London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III, pp. 614–15. The Charter was confirmed by James I’s first Parliament as 1 Jas., c.20 and remained in force until replaced by that of June, 1685, the first year of the reign of James II; ibid., pp. 622–7. 21 London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III, pp. 615–22.

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In most respects, that document simply conferred upon the Company greater legal authority to do what it had long done. Yet those claims had not managed to deter competition or intrusion in the past … nor would it in the future. Further encroachments by other crafts, especially the Plasterers, led to another formal protest. This came to fruition in the form of an act of Parliament (I Jas. I, c.20) directed squarely at the Plasterers for taking on painting against the Painter-Stainers’ monopoly.22 Yet neither that nor other efforts to protect the Company’s monopoly on its craft proved sacrosanct. The fencing match of thrust and parry with those perceived as interlopers pertained for many years to come. Given the constant activity of those whom the Company regarded as interlopers, and even including the yeomanry along with the liverymen of the Company, the approximate figure of 200 members in 1578 cannot by any means have included all the people who painted for a living, on either a full- or part-time basis, in the London area at that time. Yet the Company’s continued ability to attract new members indicates its reputation for defending painters’ interests. Such admissions records exist only for the years covered by the minute book from 1623. Even then they may be incomplete. Yet they do show that admissions by apprenticeship (the majority of all) and patrimony (fewer) and redemption (almost none), accounted for eighty-three admissions over those seventeen years, or just under five a year.23 Elections to the top offices were held annually on or shortly after St Luke’s Day (October 18th). The new officers, the master and two wardens, were drawn from the ranks of the Livery and initially meant to serve terms of two years. By the 1620s and probably well before, this had effectively become a single year’s term. High Company office conveyed power and prestige, but it also meant taking time away from one’s business. Wardens and masters were allowed to retain one extra apprentice, three rather than two, to make up some of the work, but even then some economic sacrifices must have accrued. Yet despite its drawbacks, office-holding in a London livery conveyed enormous prestige. Moving the term from two years to one further lubricated the cursus honorum by doubling the number of those who could satisfy their ambitions for office. In the event, and perhaps as an inducement to keep the right people closely involved, the Company permitted the taking of non-consecutive additional terms. Though membership in the Court of Assistants itself could endure for many years, the shorter tenures of masters and wardens facilitated a fairly rapid turnover at the very top. As in many such groups, some Assistants took the job seriously enough to attend almost every meeting; others attended more casually. There are 22 23

Excerpted in ibid., p. 627. LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, passim.

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also prolonged absences when particular Assistants were working outside London or even, at least in George Cottington’s case, overseas.24 It is perhaps noteworthy that Rowland Buckett, probably the single most prominent member of both Company and its Court in these years and the single most eminent decorative painter and contractor of his time, still managed faithfully to attend Court meetings until the very year of his death in 1638/9. In many of those meetings the Company clerk marked him down as having arrived late, the press of work and an eventual physical infirmity probably causing such delays. And yet he came. In the years covered by the Company minutes, the number of Assistants (including the master and two wardens) recorded at meetings in each year ran between seventeen in 1623 and twenty-nine in 1636, with a good mix of longstanding Assistants and relative newcomers to the Court in almost every year.25 Election to the offices of warden or master was neither automatic nor uncontested. There are intimations of nominees for top offices being rejected; there are also instances of newcomers to the Court of Assistants being elevated almost immediately to the prestigious office of warden.26 Both practices smack of in-fighting and factionalism, but no such turmoil breaks the surface of the Company’s scant records long enough to reveal any details. The Painter-Stainers never became one of the largest or most powerful of the London companies. In 1518 they were assigned to provide four bowmen to keep the watch on the vigils of St John and St Peter: half as many as the Twelve Great Liveries, but still twice as many as some of the lesser guilds.27 John Stow reports that in the order of precedence at the feast of the Lord Mayor of London in 23 Henry VIII, the Painter-Stainers ranked thirty-ninth out of sixty companies present.28 Yet it managed throughout the years to include a few members who were reasonably prominent in the city itself and even at court. Unusually by then for members of the craft (as opposed to trade) guilds, John Browne the elder (d.1532),29 John Heath the elder (d.1552/3),30 and Ralph Treswell the elder (d.1616/17)31 all served as London Aldermen in their time (though they may have had to translate to other liveries to qualify),32 and a number 24 Based on an analysis of the ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, which records attendance at meetings. For Cottington’s absence, see Tittler, EMBP, vide Cottington, George. 25 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, passim. 26 For example, John Taylor in 1631, Jonas Hopkins in 1633, George Willingham in 1634, Thomas Constable in 1636, and Nathaniel Glover in 1637. See ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’ for the years in question. 27 Unwin, Gilds and Companies of London, Appendix A.III, p. 371. 28 Charles Lethbridge Kingsford (ed.), John Stow, A Survey of London Reprinted from the Text of 1603, 2 vols, Oxford, 1908), II, pp. 58–9. 29 Tittler, EMBP, vide John Browne the elder. 30 Ibid., vide John Heath the elder. 31 Ibid., vide Ralph Treswell the elder. 32 Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (Oxford, 2004), p. 230.

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of Painter-Stainers held parish offices as well. Some found employment with the Royal Household, a few of them as Sergeant Painters to the Crown. That status allowed them to employ other Company members in painting, most of it heraldic and decorative work, in and around the court and royal properties. We may only presume that Antonio Toto or Nicholas Lyzard did so in their turn, as we have scant sources for identifying Company members in their times. But William Herne (d.1580) and Leonard Fryer (d.1605) certainly employed other Painter-Stainers after coming to the same office in 1572 and 1598 respectively. Such activities brought prominence and prestige to the Company as well, enhancing its standing amongst the other London liveries. Amongst the majority of Painter-Stainers who were primarily decorative painters, an elite few regularly commanded patronage at the highest levels of English politics and society, directing work, for example, in the great country houses and the royal navy, as well as in the livery halls of other London companies and the urban dwellings of prominent Londoners. In an era when the fashions for civic halls,33 for residential building and rebuilding in general,34 and for conspicuous display in the form of the great ‘prodigy houses’ and ‘urban palaces’ of the era all grew apace,35 the demand for painters and the role of particular Painter-Stainers grew in step. The Company found it challenging but necessary at least to try asserting control over the expanding occupation which ensued. The distinction amongst painters as a whole between one painting genre and another was not yet as firmly delineated in these years as it would become. Save for a few master craftsmen or celebrity portrait painters at court, the era’s expanding opportunities continued to encourage versatility over specialization. 33

Robert Tittler, Architecture and Power: The Town Hall and the English Urban Community, c.1500–1640 (Oxford, 1991), especially Chapter 1. 34 Though the chronology and geographic distribution of ‘The Great Rebuilding’ of rural England have been challenged since W.G. Hoskins proposed the idea, few people seriously doubt the broad efficacy of his thesis or the view that this age of population growth also marked one of intense building and furnishing of both residential and non-residential properties. W.G. Hoskins, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England 1570–1640’, Past and Present, 4 (1953), 44–59 and, for critical commentary, R. Machin, ‘The Great Rebuilding: A Reassessment’, Past and Present, 77 (Nov., 1977), 33–56; Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England (1994), pp. 11–28. 35 See, for example, the seminal study of Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Oxford, 1965) especially Chapter 10; and important subsequent works including, e.g., Maurice Howard, The Early Tudor Country House: Architecture and Politics, 1490–1550 (1967); Malcolm Airs, The Making of the English Country House, 1500–1640 (1975); Mark Giroaurd, Life in the English Country House (Harmondsworth, 1978, 1980); Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (London and New Haven, 1983); Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1999); Paul Hunneyball, Architecture and ImageBuilding in Seventeenth Century Hertfordshire (Oxford, 2004); Maurice Howard, The Building of Elizabethan and Jacobean England (London and New Haven, 2007), and Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640 (London and New Haven, 2009).

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Decorative painting work of various sorts remained the painter’s main source of work, followed closely by the painting of arms. As we’ll see, a few PainterStainers took on glass painting as well when demand for that skill resumed under James I. Despite marked distinctions in the levels of refinement, figurative painting, including portraiture, emanated from the workshops of both strangers and native English craftsmen.36 Landscape or genre painting in general were still particularly rare birds in the flock, whilst those very specific painterly skills embodied in the traditions of manuscript illumination were an entirely different enterprise altogether. The ‘limners’ who practised such crafts more frequently aligned themselves with Scriveners, Stationers, or Booksellers than with Painter-Stainers. And then, of course, some Painter-Stainers were not practising painters at all. Admission to the freemanry of London depended on company membership, but not all who coveted that civic status chose to pursue the nominal trade of a particular company or to serve an apprenticeship to that trade. They were nevertheless able to proceed to the freemanry by gaining company membership through the alternate routes of patrimony (the birthright of a Londoner born to a London freeman) or redemption (that is, payment).37 Over the longue durée, and perhaps especially after about 1570, it became increasingly common for some liverymen not to follow their eponymous trades. Some such non-painters were seen as interlopers, posing a potential threat to corporate identity. Their presence led the Painter-Stainers to share in the concern of other companies which had petitioned the London Court of Aldermen in 1571 for greater control over their respective industries.38 Yet such fears were mitigated by a growing recognition that the admission of such non-painting members by patrimony or redemption rather than apprenticeship was inevitable, and might actually be advantageous to the Company. Along with some other liveries of the same era, the Painter-Stainers came implicitly to accept that some members could both work and serve the Company in other capacities. We see such recognition at work in 1634. Fearing that shoddy workmanship threatened the reputation of the whole, the Company Court tried in that year to revive the tradition that ‘one seeking to practise the art of painting’ should demonstrate his competence by presenting a sample of his work to that assembly

36

John Bettes the elder and younger, Edward Bowers, George Cottington, William Dobson the elder, William Larkin, Simon Luttichuys (also called Littlehouse), and Richard Stephens were all primarily portrait painters, but they still enjoyed membership (and in the case of Cottington and Littichuys, very active membership) in the Company; Tittler, EMBP, see by name. 37 Steve Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 24–5. 38 Unwin, Gilds and Companies of London, p. 262; Rappaport, Worlds within Worlds, p. 91; Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 114–15.

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as had formerly been done.39 But the wording of the decision tacitly acknowledged that not all who sought entrance did ‘seek to practise’ that trade. Those who sought admission through alternative means with other occupational goals in mind might still serve the Company well. Some such non-painting members might even seek out high Company office as a springboard to personal status and influence elsewhere in the City. Their success became a source of Company pride, and could directly benefit its governance and its benevolent and ceremonial activities. George Carleton the elder (d.1635) exemplifies this career strategy well. In the 1620s and ’30s Carleton became one of the Company’s wealthiest members. He held lucrative leases to a number of shops in the Royal Exchange, worked as a dealer in gloves and mercery wares, and maintained active engagement with the Mercers’ Company over most of his career.40 During none of those years has any evidence of his painting work come to light. Yet he was also one of the Company’s most prominent members, serving as its Master in 1623–24 and 1628–29, and continuing on the Court of Assistants until his death. In those capacities he will have presided over meetings of the Company Court and represented his brethren before the Crown and the City. Henry Isaacson (1581–1654), Carleton’s long-time colleague on the Court of Assistants, had gained his freedom through patrimony: his father was the Painter-Stainer Richard Isaacson the elder (d.1621). Henry will undoubtedly have been encouraged to retain close ties to the Company by his uncle, the equally influential Painter-Stainer Paul Isaacson (1565–1655), and his brother-in-law, the prominent painter John Potkyn (d.1642 or 1643). Isaacson went on to active membership and high Company office, serving on its Court of Assistants from at least 1623 until after 1640, holding office as Upper Warden in 1629/30 and Master in 1633/4 and again in 1639/40. On several occasions he served on Company searches for illicit or shoddy work, lending his authority as an officer in the event. But throughout his years of activity in Company affairs he pursued the life of a scholar and not a painter. He had been admitted to Pembroke Hall, Cambridge (now Pembroke College; John Aubrey thought he had taken an MA, but this is uncertain) and Cambridge formed the basis of a scholarly career in which painting may at best have been pursued as a hobby. His Cambridge days also brought him to a close and life-long connection to Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), bishop of Winchester, in whose household be served as secretary, of whom he was the biographer, and whom he may have portrayed.41 39

LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 91. The Goldsmiths had tried to tighten their admission standards in the same manner, but to no avail. David M. Mitchell, Silversmiths in Elizabethan and Stuart London: Their Lives and their Marks (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 24–6. 40 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, fol. 1r. et passim; Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 210; TNA, PROB. 11/168/379 and Req. 2/407/19; Cliff Webb (ed.), London Livery Company Apprenticeship Registers, vol. 35, Cutlers’ Company, 1447–1498, 1565–1800 (2001), 51; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 52. 41 ODNB, vide Isaacson; TNA, PROB 11/247/70; LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p.

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The two halves of Isaacson’s life appear entirely distinct, and yet they sometimes intersected in useful ways. When, in a dispute of 1636 with the stranger-painters in the King’s service, the Company had need to appeal to the very cosmopolitan and influential King’s Surveyor, no less a figure than Inigo Jones, they enlisted Isaacson’s eloquence in composing and presenting their missive.42 In addition to its enduring conflicts with such groups as the heralds in the College of Arms, the Plasterers, or the ‘stranger-painters’ in general, the social and economic distance between Company grandees like Buckett, Carleton, and the Isaacsons and the merest householders at the bottom rungs of the Company ladder no doubt posed its own challenges to the harmony and identity of the whole. The precise details of such conflicts have rarely survived for any company, and have not done so for the Painter-Stainers of this era. But it remains clear that the success with which any livery met such challenges rested on its leaders’ ability to maintain the deference, respect, and collaboration of the rank and file. Guilds and liveries in general relied on structures and practices both formal and informal to serve these ends. Many such protocols extended back well into pre-Reformation times, adjusting to circumstances as they went and proving their worth as vital sinews of the whole. Most of the stresses and strains which may have prompted these devices amongst the Painter-Stainers will not have been new when surviving records from the 1620s and onwards bring them into sharper focus. The Company’s obligations to carry on traditional charitable activities, to enforce standards of production, and to maintain the dignity of the whole ‘mystery’ remained as important in these years as ever before. In the hard winter of 1624/5 it created a granary in Painter-Stainers’ Hall in which to store grain against the prospect of dearth;43 during the plague epidemic of the following year it cancelled its annual St Katherine’s Day dinner and distributed the funding to indigent members instead.44 Some of the more prosperous brethren, including the long-time Assistant and sometime Warden (1627/8) Jeremy Crewe, were especially noteworthy for addressing the plight of the poor. In his will of 1637 Crewe left £100 to employ poor members of the Company in grinding pigments.45

1 et seq.; Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 210; Cambridge Alumni Directory, http://venn.lib.cam.ac, vide Isaacson, Henry; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. O.L. Dick (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1957), p. 172; J.C. Whitebrook and W. Whitebrook (eds), London Citizens in 1651 [c.1910], p. 7; Cliff Webb (ed.), London Livery Company Apprenticeship Registers, vol. 44, Fishmongers’ Company, 1614–1800 (2006), p. 71; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 113. 42 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 110. 43 Ibid., p. 11. 44 Ibid., p. 17. My thanks to Professor Tracey Hill for pointing out this possibility. 45 TNA, PROB. 11/174/649 (19 August 1637).

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Towards a similar end, protecting members’ livelihoods remained a prime concern throughout. The Company carried out regular searches – fortnightly in 163846 – and it constantly took action against Company members producing shoddy work from within as well as unlicensed painters working without. As noted above, it attempted to restore the rule that anyone ‘of the Company’ practising ‘the art of painting’ should first submit a sample of his work to the Company Court for approval.47 It constantly enjoined members to attend meetings and dinners, to pay their dues on time, and promptly to settle arrears. As a last resort, it reported to the Lord Mayor the names of those who repeatedly neglected their obligations.48 The enforcement of Company regulations had to remain sensitive to competing interests. Absences from meetings and refusals to hold office, for example, were regularly met with fines, and these were frequently levied for other offences as well. But such fines had to be kept reasonably moderate lest they appear too punitive and drive offenders out of the fold.49 Particular care had to be taken when senior members refused office or absented themselves for long periods whilst they travelled to take on commissions outside London. The Company may have been London-based, with its jurisdiction circumscribed by the urban area and its suburbs. But the very nature of the painters’ occupation often entailed commissions well outside the metropolis. Whether in country houses elsewhere or even overseas, Painter-Stainers did travel, and they could be away for long intervals. Ironically, the more prominent the craftsman, the more often this was likely to happen. John Hormer willingly paid his fine for refusing office in 1635, noting that ‘his business laye continuously in the Countrey’ so that he would often be absent if elected.50 He was relatively small fry in the Company hierarchy. But when George Cottington (d.c. 1648), a leading liveryman with court connections and a member of the Court of Assistants, pleaded to be excused on several occasions when commissions required his absence from London, the Company had to apply some give and take. The Assistants excused him on several occasions, but by 1643 their patience wore thin. After his departure for an undisclosed overseas destination, they expelled him from his post as Upper Warden, offering the proviso that he be allowed to resume that office only on the payment of a fine of £8. Only in August of 1646 was he briefly allowed to resume his post.51

46

LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 125, 131. Ibid., pp. 91, 127. 48 Ibid., p. 17. 49 Patrick Wallis, ‘Controlling Commodities: Search and Reconciliation in the Early Modern Livery Companies’, in Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450–1800, eds. Ian Anders Gadd and Patrick Wallis (2002), pp. 88–9. 50 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 108. 51 Ibid., p. 8; Robert Tittler, ‘George Cottington’, ODNB. 47

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When push came to shove in defending its monopoly on painting within the area of its jurisdiction or its ability to uphold the standards of such work by its own members, a company had its power of search on which to rely. It, too, had to be exercised sensitively, especially when applied to Painter-Stainers themselves, and forcefully, if necessary, when applied to others. Strictly speaking, searches entailed organized and periodic perambulations of the city or neighbourhood by experienced members of the Livery, in which finished painting was inspected, judged on its quality, and either accepted or rejected accordingly.52 Painters’ workshops were also subject to searches, with the same objectives in mind. The perambulatory routes taken by some searchers seem to have been determined in random fashion. Other routes were determined by reports of insufficient work brought to the Company either by its members or others. The power to search included the authority to seize faulty work (difficult in the case of a wall or a barge!) or work done illicitly, and to exercise some form of redress against its producers. The ability to enforce a guild’s monopoly through its powers of search has often been taken as a measure of the strength and viability of the guild system itself.53 Those not free of the Company were permitted to paint if they paid quarterly fees for permission to do so. Alternatively, they could employ those who had apprenticed to the Painter-Stainers to do it for them. Notwithstanding those alternatives, the Company Court frequently received reports of such illicit painting. The Company employed its every resource to monitor and police transgressions and to bring them, when necessary, to the attention of higher authorities. The occurrence of such intrusions, and the need for augmented power to combat them, had perhaps been the Company’s single greatest motivation for seeking royal confirmation of its ordinances in 1582. Following that attainment, the Company wielded its augmented powers on frequent occasions, even bringing suit in the major courts when necessary. The 1590s were a particularly fraught decade throughout the nation in several respects, and one marked amongst London liveries by a more frequent concern for the protection of monopolies.54 In 1594 the Painter-Stainers made a particularly eloquent appeal in the Star Chamber for redress against seventeen interlopers. They referred to the defendants’ work as bringing great impoverishment and decay to legitimate painters, and referred to the improper 52 See

especially Wallis, ‘Controlling Commodities’, pp. 85–100 and Michael Berlin, ‘“Broken all in Pieces”: Artisans and the Regulation of Workmanship in Early Modern London’, in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot, 1997), pp. 78–84. 53 A debate summarized in Wallis, ‘Controlling Commodities’, p. 86. 54 See, for example, John Pound, Poverty and Vagrancy (1971); Andrew Appleby, Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (Stanford, 1978), Chaps 8 and 9; Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (1988); Peter Clark, ‘A Crisis Contained? The Condition of Towns in the 1590s’, in The European Crisis of the 1590s: Essays in Comparative History, ed. Peter Clark (1985), pp. 44–66; Archer, Pursuit of Stability, p. 147.

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use of materials leading to ‘the utter slander of the saide Ancient Arte of Painting’ itself.55 Whatever the resolution of that suit may have been, it obviously failed to solve the problem. Whilst the Company implicitly conceded the ability of the celebrated stranger-painters, many of them protected by influential and powerful patrons, to carry on their work unimpeded, it frequently targeted the members of the building trades who were considered interlopers to the painters’ trade. The normal work of, for example, carvers, masons, joiners, carpenters, and especially plasterers all entailed some basic forms of painting from time to time. But others whose work was much further removed from the painters’ were sometimes involved as well. In 1632 a Company report of non-members caught painting named a boxmaker, a horserider, an embroiderer, a bookseller, and a joiner.56 Plasterers had long been a frequent target in these disputes. An essential part of their work consisted of brushing on coats of size, a water-soluble and glutinous coating which prepared a plastered surface for painting or gilding. Size could be tinted with colours before being brushed on, which led painters to claim that plasterers were painting without apprenticing to that craft. A suit brought by the Painter-Stainers against the Plasterers’ Company was already pending when the Company Court minutes begin in October 1623. Reference to it occurs on the very first page,57 followed on the very next page by the Painter-Stainer Richard Rider’s complaint against the Plasterer Thomas Wigmore for illicitly using ochre and ‘laying anneale’ in violation of the painters’ monopoly.58 Yet this was obviously but one skirmish in a long series of battles which had raged between the two for generations, battles in which claims and counter-claims were voiced in the City courts, the Middlesex Sessions, and the Exchequer.59 The conflict between the two came to something of a head in 1597/8 when the Painter-Stainers determined to obtain statutory redress against what they saw as the intrusion of the Plasterers on their turf. A bill brought into Parliament at that time was hard fought by spokesmen for both sides. In the end, the Plasterers gained the support of a delegation of London MPs to ward it off, though they did agree to restrict their painting with size to four principal colours. In the equally trying year of 1601 the Painter-Stainers went at it again, arguing that the Plasterers had failed to fulfil their promise to restrict their use of colours and continued to intrude on the Painters’ monopoly. Their intrusions had seriously impinged on the painters’ livelihood and brought the craft into a state of decay. Despite eloquent support on the floor of the Commons by the Lincoln’s Inn 55

The Master, Wardens, and Commonalty of the Painter-Stainers v. George Mason, Henry Bridges et al., 18 October, 36 Elizabeth, TNA, STAC. 5/P52/15. The defendants’ demurrer refers to a previous suit brought against them in the Exchequer. 56 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 74. 57 Ibid., p. 1. 58 Ibid., p. 2. 59 Archer, Pursuit of Stability, pp. 146–7.

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barrister Hayward Townshend, MP for Bishop’s Castle, the Middle Temple lawyer John Davies, MP for Corfe Castle, and the London MP Sir Stephen Soame, the bill was rejected at its third reading in the House of Lords and referred again to the arbitration of the City government.60 Unwilling to take ‘no’ for an answer, the Company went at it yet again in the first Parliament of the new reign, and was finally successful: a slightly weaker bill made it through in 1604 to become law at long last.61 That statute restricted the Plasterer’s use of size to six colours, and prohibited the use of oil as its base. If plasterers wished to take on painting beyond that, they were required to employ someone who had apprenticed with the Painter-Stainers to do it for them. The penalties for failing to comply with these rules amounted to a fine of five pounds, which could be a considerable sum for a single, simple plastering commission.62 Despite even this legislative victory the conflict continued to simmer, if not always to boil, for years to come. In November 1637, a plasterer was found illicitly painting in oil in a Hounsditch tavern, and doing so in the failing light of dusk to avoid easy detection.63 In February 1638 the Painter-Stainers fined the Plasterer William Hollins, alias Holland, for another such violation.64 And so it went! Plasterers were of course not unique in violating the Painter-Stainers’ monopolies or their standards of production. Typical of search findings were the transgressions recorded in the minutes of 1632. Some painting had been done by apprentices who had not yet completed their apprenticeship: a clear violation of both the Statute of Artificers of 1563 and the Painters’ Statute of 1604. In addition, some outsiders had painted without paying quarterage fees for the Company’s permission. A bookseller had been found to have sold paintings in violation of the 1604 statute, which had restricted retail sales to painters alone, and a non-Painter-Stainer had been painting boxes.65 All lay in a day’s work for the Company’s diligent searchers! In addition to searches taken at its own initiative or at the request of some of its members, the Company sometimes responded to requests from the Crown or City government to carry out what amounted to inspections of work which had come into dispute. The fact that those requests were forthcoming tells us that those authorities respected the Company’s expertise and recognized its 60

Described in detail in David Dean, Law-Making and Society in Late Elizabethan England: The Parliament of England, 1584–1601 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 148 and 277. See also essays on Davies, Soame, and Townshend, in History of Parliament Trust: The House of Commons, 1558–1603, ed. P.W. Hasler (3 vols, 1981) II, pp. 22–3; and III, pp. 414, 516–17. 61 Jas. I, c.20. 62 The statute only permitted the Plasterers to use whiting, blacking, red lead, red ochre, yellow ochre, and russet, all mixed with size rather than oil. 63 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 124. 64 Ibid., p. 126. 65 Ibid., p. 73.

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authority, and felt free to rely upon it for expert opinion. The most dramatic such instance recorded in the surviving minute book came in December 1630 as a request to the Master and Wardens of the Company from Jan de Critz the elder (1551/2–1642). De Critz was an old man by then. He had lost his sight, but retained his office as Sergeant Painter to the Crown. He had been directed by the Lord Chamberlain to ask the Company to inspect, evaluate, and estimate the appropriate costs of the work which his own workshop had done in painting, gilding, and trimming the royal barges. In the end, the Company inspectors reported the work to be worth somewhat less than de Critz had charged.66 Painting carried out by others might be seen to impoverish honest painters and to bring the entire craft into disrepute by shoddy work. But such charges made it incumbent upon the Company to police its own lest it be seen as winking at its own failings to the same deleterious effect. The request for a search of de Critz’s work may have come from outside the Company in the person of the Lord Chamberlain, but the Company often initiated inspections of its own members’ work. It needed to do so in a fraternal manner, settling disputes in-house rather than risking public exposure and preferring arbitration and negotiation over heavy-handed censure. In effect, that meant that the Court of Assistants usually asked that shoddy work be redone or repaired, and resubmitted for inspection. The culture of compliance which had long prevailed in most companies made resistance to such sanctions uncommon. Company minutes record several successful and apparently amicable re-workings of shoddy work.67 In some instances, a Painter-Stainer could request a search of his own work when its quality had been questioned by the patron. Responses were inconsistent. The quality of a painting done at the Lord Mayor’s house by Nathaniel Glover (d.1638) had been called into question in 1629, but the Company refused to comply with Glover’s request to inspect it, noting that it could only do so when asked by the Lord Mayor.68 But when the Painter-Stainer Philip Bromfield (d.1650) made a similar request in 1638 regarding his work at Westminster Abbey, the Company appointed a committee of five, including both Company wardens, to inspect it.69 The Company Court may have been willing to support a member against the officials of the Abbey, but not against the Lord Mayor on whose good will it particularly depended. Successful searching also rested in part on the ability to engage senior members of the Company as searchers on a frequent and regular basis. Though the absence of earlier Company minutes obscures past practice, minutes of the 1620s and ’30s clearly show how the Company doubled down on searching activities in those years.70 In August 1638 the Court of Assistants ‘reminded’ all 66

Ibid., pp. 59, 68. Ibid., pp. 2, 48, 98. 68 Ibid., p. 48. 69 Ibid., p. 129. 70 Ibid., pp. 1, 7, 18–19, 32, 40, 43, 48, 69, 72–3, 131. 67

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painters to inform the Company clerk of their work so that it could be recorded and inspected. The clerk and beadle were ordered to warn the freemen of other companies and ‘strangers’ in general to pay their quarterages to the Company if they wished to paint.71 In the following month the Company proceeded to institute a regular search so as to remedy the ‘… many abuses in making bad worke in and about the cittie of London and subburbes thereof as well by divers Painters free of this Company and others … to the great impoverishing of many able woormen [sic] free of this Company’.72 Such searches were to be held fortnightly, their results to be recorded for further action. Whether or not these edicts had lasting effect remains uncertain, but the Company was feeling the press of competition with particular intensity by that time, and had resolved to respond as best and forcefully as it could. The pressures of these years, and especially increasing competition from non-members, the rising costs of civic obligations, the increased size and unwieldiness of the Livery itself, and perhaps (as we’ll see in Chapter 9) the decline in most painters’ real oncome over time, all pulled at the joints of the Company ship. In 1629 the Company abandoned for good the custom whereby newly admitted freemen held a dinner for the master, wardens, and assistants. It had become too expensive, and the inherent costs threatened to discourage potential admissions. A payment of ten shillings was instituted instead, but an important occasion for commensality had been sacrificed in the exchange.73 When a second cancellation of the St Katherine’s Dinner occurred in 1630, not this time due to any plague, no distribution of alms seems to have followed.74 In all these elements of the ambient corporate culture, the physical condition, operation, and dignity of the Company Hall remained essential. It became imperative to keep it in good repair, to use its furnishing and decoration visually to convey the integrity of the Fellowship, and to ensure an appropriately hospitable and dignified reception to brethren and their guests. In a note which transcends the centuries between that time and ours, the very first page of the Court Minute Book records dissatisfaction with the Company cook, a Mr Bertram, and with the Company steward, William Lee.75 Company dinners were an integral part of company life, and they had to work well in order to encourage attendance at meetings and ceremonial occasions. Bertram and Lee had obviously faltered in their obligations: a matter of concern to all. By 1630 the Painter-Stainers also had reason to ponder the physical state of their Hall, located on Little Trinity Lane. Few company halls of the day had been purpose-built. Most required constant repair and renovation. Painter-Stainers’ Hall, the building itself first mentioned in the form of a tenement and shops 71

Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 131. 73 Ibid., p. 49. 74 Ibid., p. 57. 75 Ibid., p. 1. 72

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in the year 1423/4, was no exception.76 It had been willed to the Company in 1532 by the former Sergeant-Painter and one-time Master John Browne, whose residence it had been. The Hall had upper chambers which could be let as rental income,77 but its main function was to serve the Company as a place in which to hold meetings, dinners, elections, and ceremonial events, thus also making it a place of memory and commemoration. By 1630 the Hall not only required repair, which it will have done from time to time in any event, but also an upgrading to meet contemporary aesthetic standards and to accommodate an expanding membership. In that year the very senior Company official Paul Isaacson designed a plan for its extensive renovation, and then found himself put in charge of the work. When the project seemed to drag on, the Assistants brought in new craftsmen to finish the job and struck a committee to meet every Saturday afternoon to survey their progress.78 In the event, the Assistants demanded that ‘the best possible’ English workmen be employed, and the appropriate ‘inventories, copies, patterns, and draughts’ be brought to the task. They assigned no less a figure than Rowland Buckett to help Isaacson oversee the work.79 Given that push, renovations seem to have been completed by the following year. But in 1633 the Apothecaries gave up a lease which they had held on the building’s Upper Hall, leaving that space unfurnished and depriving the Company of important rental income which might have gone into the maintenance budget.80 In 1638 additional renovations were required.81 The Great Fire of September 1666 rendered all that work irrelevant by destroying the building altogether, but some hints remain of how the Hall had been decorated, thus intimating how the Company articulated its own identity. The overall effort here was to reinforce the Company’s heritage and honour, and with it the ‘arte’ of painting itself. The 1630 renovations included extensive wainscoting and the construction and placement of the Company’s arms. The special assessment of thirty-shillings on each member to defray the cost of construction suggests a grand display.82 What may well have been an even more elaborate heraldic display came gratis when Joshua Carpenter (d.1660) followed up his 1641 Mastership of the Company by presenting the

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City of London, Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III, p. 638. Deed of Property, 24 September, 24 Henry VIII, LGL, MS CLC/PA/G/012/MS05670; ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 86. The Hall was destroyed in the Fire of London 1666 and the current Hall built on the same Little Trinity Lane site. 78 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 50, 55–6, 57. 79 Ibid., p. 55. 80 Ibid., p. 86. The Pipemakers briefly took up a lease for that space in 1635, but seem to have vacated by 1642. Englefield, History of the Painter-Stainers, pp. 103, 105. Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 27. 81 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 128. 82 Ibid., p. 56. 77

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Company’s arms ‘with two figures over the front door to the street with the two shields on the posts’.83 There were also Company portraits. The display of civic portraits – those commissioned and displayed by civic bodies rather than by individuals84 – had by this time become a common material expression of institutional identity and pride in towns, cities, livery companies, and similar bodies. The Painter-Stainers were far from being first off the mark in thinking about such works for their own halls. The famous group portrait of the Barber Surgeons receiving their charter from Henry VIII, c.1543, emanating from the studio if not necessarily the actual brush of Hans Holbein, takes the laurels for that.85 But numerous other companies, including the Grocers, Haberdashers, and Cutlers, had commissioned portraits of their most eminent figures by about 1620. Each had thereby enshrined for all posterity the contributions of worthy forebears.86 There is some irony in the Painter-Stainers’ apparent tardiness in creating such paintings, as members had done long them and other such works for other companies. There is even the suggestion that the Painter-Stainers may not as a Company have valued paintings simply for their aesthetic quality. By the 1630s it had accumulated a number of pictures, though their subject matter remains unknown. Perhaps they were merely assorted drafts and painted bits and pieces which various members had simply stored in the Hall. Perhaps they were more than that. In any event, and however odd it may seem, the Company Court didn’t appear too concerned about their condition or display. In February 1635 the prominent liveryman William Foster (fl.1620s–160s) offered to purchase ‘the pictures in the house which serve no use and are likely to be spoiled if some course were not taken with them’. The Court responded by appointing one of their number to assess the collection, and to set a fair price on those which they agreed to sell him.87 No further account of the transaction appears in Company records. The paintings which Foster coveted may or may not have amounted to much. It sounds like some had gathered dust in the Hall for a long time. But they are unlikely to have been portraits of Company worthies or gifts from Company members.88 These would have been retained and treated more respectfully. Though earlier portraits may have existed there, the first such portrait which can be identified as appearing in the Painter-Stainers’ Hall is that of the antiquary William Camden, dated 1623, and it was never approved for sale. 83 Borg,

Painter-Stainers, pp. 27–8. The whole construct fell victim to the Great Fire of 1666. Face of the City, pp. 3–6. 85 Ibid., pp. 52–4. 86 Ibid., pp. 52–7, 174–5. 87 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 102. Foster had been on the Court of Assistants from 1626, and served as one of the Company’s two Wardens in 1629/30 and again in 1633/4. 88 Borg assumes that these were company portraits, though the records offer no such indication; Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 49. 84 Tittler,

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His portrait was probably done to commemorate Camden’s efforts to mediate the Painter-Stainers’ long-standing dispute with the Heralds, to celebrate the memory of his father, the Painter-Stainer Samson Camden, and to recognize William’s own benefactions to the Company which will have been revealed at his death in that year.89 There soon followed several triple portraits, which came to be done annually to mark the mastership and wardenship of the three leading officials of that year. These seem to have been displayed at least during or shortly after the relevant terms of office before being taken down and replaced by the next trio. Those done in 1631 of Clement Pargiter (d.1631), Thomas Babb (d.1649), and William Peacock (d.1642) and in the following year of Master John Potkin (d.1642/3), flanked by Wardens Thomas Carleton (d.1641) and John Taylor (d.1651), survive in Painters’ Hall to the present day (see Fig. 5).90 These portraits presented the officers of the day both as icons of authority and exemplars of wise and dignified governance. They depict their subjects robed in the Company livery, and bearing their freeman’s gloves as an indication of their legal status within the City of London. Taylor’s figure in the latter painting shows him holding an armorial scroll: he was one of the eight contemporary Painter-Stainers licensed by the College of Arms to produce such work. Taken together, these portraits celebrated the Company’s leadership, enhanced its Hall itself as a site of celebration and memory, and exemplified its place within the City. Much the same function accrued in the Hall’s lavish display of gifts which various members bestowed from time to time in these decades. As is well known, the practice of gift giving benefitted the donor as well as the recipient. While adding to the wealth and prestige of the Company, the display of such gifts as silver or gold plate allowed the donor a means of negotiating his status within the ambient society and culture of the day, and establishing his presence in the collective memory of the recipient craft.91 The mnemonic role of such gift endures in the association of the name of the donor with the gift, an association demonstrated by the Camden Cup (1623), the Beeston Salt (1636), the Lilly Drinking Cup (1638), etc.92 89

Ibid., pp. 50–2; LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 60. For Camden’s mediation, see below, pp. 131–2. 90 Borg, Painter-Stainers, pp. 50–2; LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 60. The commissioning of the former picture was unusual. The Company gave what it referred to as ‘…the great frame unwrought’ to the widow of Clement Pargiter to have her husband’s picture ‘wrought’ therein. In the event, it must have been she who decided to include Pargiter’s fellow officers as well, but as the Company retained the resulting image, they must have approved her choice. 91 Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, ‘Gifting Cultures and Artisanal Guilds in Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century London’, Historical Journal, 60:4 (Dec., 2017), 865–87. 92 The names commemorate William Camden, the sometime Master John Beeston (1625/6 and 1630), and the Assistant Henry Lilly who, as will be noted in the next chapter, was trying to restore his standing in the Company after his role in the dispute with the heralds. Other

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Fig. 5. Anon., The Officers of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1632). While the minutes tell us little else about the Hall’s furnishing, they do note the construction of panes of painted glass showing the classical figures of Juno, Venus, and Pallas with one to be added of Paris and the Golden Apple. These may seem like nothing more than conventional decorative scenes of the day, but they reflect on the long and honourable history of the trade of painting itself, one of a piece with their claim in their petition of 1578 to be carrying forth the legacy of the painter Apelles.93 That classical imagery of both glass and text also show that the Painter-Stainers had at last absorbed at least some of the cultural associations of contemporary humanist scholarship even if they failed in these years to apply those lessons to most of their actual painting. As we can see, a company hall served many functions. While it spoke internally to the company brethren, it also marked a company’s visual footprint in the city’s centre, and as a liminal space between company and city. Its façade gifts accrued in these years from Stephen Reade (Assistant in 1626/7) and Tobias Randall (1640). Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 53. 93 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 56.

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proclaimed the strength and dignity of the company before the general public; its function in hosting city officials or other eminences to attend company dinners remained important elements of institutional honour. Other formal protocols also worked to project the Company’s dignity, and the dignity of the occupation itself, into the wider city. Many of them extended far back in time, but nevertheless had to be maintained, restated, and in some cases reconfigured to suit the changing times. From time to time, for example, the Council reminded members to wear clean aprons when going about outside their shops, and to don their full liveries on holidays and other ceremonial occasions.94 The proper wearing of gowns had become a matter of considerable moment in the corporate dignity of the era. As John Earle noted in 1622, the London alderman was ‘… venerable in his gowne … wherewith he setts forth not so much his owne, as the face of a city. His Scarlet gowne is a Monument, and lasts from generation to generation.’95 Earle referred to the aldermen of the city itself, but he might as well have meant aldermen of the companies. PainterStainers’ liverymen certainly had to wear their gowns in civic processions and when attending the Lord Mayor at St Paul’s. By 1638 they had become too numerous at the latter events to fit into their accustomed places. Their numbers had then to be divided into two parts, each to attend in alternation. But proper gowns were still de rigueur.96 In addition to these deliberate efforts to sustain the Company’s strength and integrity against the myriad centrifugal forces which tugged at its fibres, ties of family, friendship, neighbourhood, and parish worked informally towards the same end.97 None of these characteristics applied exclusively to the PainterStainers, yet they helped to shape and sustain the Livery and, in the long run, other such occupations. The strength of such ties remains difficult to quantify in any meaningful way. Family relationships may be matters of record, often traceable through such sources as wills and parish registers. But some families are, and were then, closer-knit than others, so that the depth and quality of their relationships simply defy measurement. The same may be said for qualities of friendship and neighbourliness, all of which relationships might help fortify the ambient society. Yet even if it remains impossible to gauge the strength of such ties, the 94

Ibid., p. 137. John Earle, Microcosmographie, or a Peece of the World Discovered (1622), part 5. 96 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 134 and 136. Guildsmen of both major and minor liveries will have attended the Lord Mayor at St Paul’s on special occasions such as Easter, or to mark great events such as the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot. Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons (Oxford, 2011), p. 23. I am grateful to Professor Torrance Kirby for this reference. 97 See especially Archer, Pursuit of Stability, esp. Chapter 3, and Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 228–35. 95

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most detailed prosopographical study yet done of London painters in the era 1547–1625 certainly affirms their presence.98 Families like the Bakers, Betteses, Englands, Freesingfelds, Fryers, Glovers, Heaths, Hernes, Isaacsons, Knights, Kimbys, Lyzards, Masseys, along with still others with whom they inter-married, formed virtual family clans within both Livery and occupation, extending to two, three, and exceptionally to four generations. As demonstrated by the extensive ties amongst such families as the de Critzes and Gheeraertses, much of the same could also be said about painters outside the ranks of the Company,99 and probably of other crafts as well. Though it is true, as we have seen, that not all Painter-Stainers practised that eponymous occupation, most of them did. In so doing, they retained their family’s occupational affiliation, and often kept up a family’s workshop, reputation, and capital equipment over the course of decades and generations. The implications of these close-knit family networks will be explored further in Chapter 7 but for the moment, they tell us a lot about the internal strength of occupation in the London metropolis. Residential proximity played a similarly important role in the strength and cohesion of the Company’s membership. Like many other artisanal groups, Painter-Stainers tended to clump together in particular areas. Their geographic concentrations may not have been as specific as in some other trades – those, for example which depended heavily on proximity to shipping and the docks100 – but proximity to sources of patronage and employment remained an important consideration for master painters and householders alike. This had been true well back in time, when, for example, Painters settled near to the Saddlers, with whom they often collaborated in the painting of saddle bows,101 and who themselves had gathered in and around Cripplegate Ward. Painters subsequently gathered there as well, coming together particularly in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate.102 Many of them continued to dwell in that vital and cohesive parish right into the seventeenth century and beyond.103 Other 98

Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’. By relying heavily on parish registers, sometimes even to the exclusion of other sources, Town’s work proves particularly useful in revealing the extent of such ties. 99 Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, vide de Critz; Gheeraerts. 100 Michael J. Power, ‘The Urban Development of East London, 1550–1700’, (Unpublished PhD thesis, London University, 1971), especially Chapter 6; Power, ‘The East and the West in Early Modern London’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England, Essays Presented to S.T. Bindoff, ed. E.W. Ives, R. Knecht, and J.J. Scarisbrick (1978), pp. 167–85. 101 Unwin, Gilds and Companies of London, pp. 73, 85–6, 107. 102 Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 231–2. 103 As Professor Caroline Barron has noted, the vitality and cohesiveness of that particular parish was demonstrated in the rebuilding of the parish church between 1545 and 1550. Caroline M. Barron, ‘The Parish Fraternities of Medieval London’, in The Church in Pre-Reformation Society: Essays in Honour of F.R.H. Du Boulay, ed. Barron and Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1985), p. 36, n. 109, reprinted in Martha Carlin and Joel T. Rosenthal (eds), Medieval London: Collected Papers of Caroline M. Barron (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2017), p. 155.

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parishes which painters came to favour over time tended to lie just outside the walls or across the river: St Botolph’s Aldgate and St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the first instance; the two Southwark parishes of St Olave and St Saviour in the latter.104 The later Elizabethan and early Stuart development of the West End brought new concentrations in those areas, especially amongst high-end portrait and decorative painters catering to the court-connected and affluent residents of the area.105 They included George Cottington and George Gower (1538/9–96) in St Clement Danes; whilst Westminster’s St Martin-in-the-Fields hosted John Bettes the elder (d.1563 or 1565) and the Sergeant Painter Nicholas Lyzard the elder at a relatively early time followed by the likes of Buckett, Jan de Critz (1551/2–1642), Matthew Goodrick (d.1645), Richard Greenbury (fl.1698–post-1651), Nicholas Hilliard, Rowland Lockey (c.1566–1616), and then the stranger-painters Paul van Somer (d.1622), and Abraham van Blijenberch (d.1624).106 The concentration of these prominent masters created something of a multiplier effect as the journeymen and smaller householders whom they employed, relatives and non-relatives alike, readily gathered around them. The parish of St Botolph without Aldgate, for example, saw substantial population growth from the mid-sixteenth century, and that potential clientele readily attracted its share of painters. The Sergeant Painter Leonard Fryer and his multi-generational clan of painters made it their home ground from the mid-Elizabethan years and stayed there into the reign of Charles II.107 No fewer than eleven members of the Fryer family, even excluding several in-laws who also painted, were Painter-Stainers during the era at hand. Six of them – William (d.1569), his son the Sergeant Painter Leonard the elder, along with Leonard’s sons Percival (1577–1606), Leonard the younger (1581–1625), Robert (d.1617), and Leonard the younger’s son Leonard III (d.1667) – resided in that same parish. One of the most successful painters of his time, Leonard the elder must share credit with his father William for setting the family enterprise firmly on the rails. Leonard appears to have been born in that parish, and certainly lived there by the time he was admitted to the Painter-Stainers in 1575. The admission of his grandson Leonard III to the Company by patrimony in 1629 brought yet another generation of the family to the trade. It remained there until the grandson’s death in 1667: more than a century after the family’s first appearance in the Company. Along with the sundry Fryer painters who dwelt in St Botolph without Aldgate were numerous others in the same trade. As few of them became prominent on

104 Town,

‘A Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 234–5. pp. 234–5. 106 Ibid., pp. 234–5, and for individual painters, Tittler, EMBP, see entries by name. 107 Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 82–4, 228; ODNB, vide Fryer, Leonard; Mary Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”: New Light on the Lives of Miniaturists and Largescale Portrait Painters Working in London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Walpole Society, 47 (1978–80), 63, 167, 184–6. 105 Ibid.,

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their own, it seems reasonable to assume that at least some of them will have worked for or with the Fryers in some capacity some of the time.108 The burgeoning clientele which drew painters to these areas outside the walls included some of the wealthiest and aristocratic members of the city’s population along with members of the court circle.109 From the mid-Elizabethan years right to the outbreak of the Civil Wars the western parishes of St Clement Danes and St Martin-in-the-Fields experienced dramatic population growth. Though it may have been lined with pockets of poverty along its cross streets and alleys, the Strand itself, connecting the City and Westminster, brimmed with armigerous and/or court-connected families anxious to decorate their homes and celebrate themselves.110 It included Somerset House, The Savoy, Essex House, Arundel House, Bedford House, and Cecil House, along with numerous slightly lesser properties of men like Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon (d.1579), in Charing Cross. By the early seventeenth century other West End areas included sundry armigerous enclaves amongst their general population.111 It is no wonder that so many painters, and especially those catering to the well-to-do, settled in or near the same areas of the metropolis from the mid-Elizabethan years onwards. Over the course of time then, Painter-Stainers probably interacted with each other outside the Company Hall and particular workshops even more than within. From one generation to the next, they and their families intermingled in church, in the streets, and in their local taverns and shops. They and their wives and servants constantly engaged in casual conversations and other informal interactions. All these factors, both deliberate and casual, made for a tightly woven fabric of associations, loyalties, and collaborations within the Company and the occupation. Considered in the context of the pre-industrial economy as a whole, the success of the London liveries and other guilds in fulfilling their historic roles has become 108 Town,

‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 228. Boulton, ‘The Poor Among the Rich: Paupers and the Parish in the West End, 1600–1724’, in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S.R. Jenner (Manchester, 2000), pp. 199–203 and Figure 10.1; J.F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster, 1525–1640 (Manchester, 2005), pp. 194–5. 110 See especially Merritt, The Social World, pp. 188–201, 259–62. 111 M.J. Power, ‘East and West in Early-Modern London’, in Wealth and Power in Tudor England, ed. Ives et al., pp. 169 et passim; Lawrence Stone, ‘The Residential Development of the West End of London in the Seventeenth Century’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J.H. Hexter, ed. Barbara Malament (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 167–214; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Court and its Neighbourhood: Royal Policy and Urban Growth in the Early Stuart West End’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (April, 1991), 117–49; Vanessa Harding, ‘The Changing Shape of Seventeenth Century London’, in Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720, ed. J.F. Merritt (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 117–43. 109 Jeremy

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controversial. Recent research has questioned the long-standing view that guilds entered into a long and steady decline from the seventeenth century onwards. It has suggested instead that guilds did not so much become irrelevant as change their role, from one of protecting the economic interests of their members by restricting trade to a broader set of social and political aims.112 The years of our study that are well enough documented to offer evidence of such change or decline, essentially from 1623 when consistent Company records begin to the approximate bookend year of 1640, are too few to allow much of an assessment. Yet the records clearly do reveal the tensions which might have led to such a transition. They describe a Company vigorously defending its privileges against both native English and stranger interlopers throughout the years to 1640. They reveal the increasing number of Company leaders, as well, presumably, of lesser members, who were not actually painters, though they also show some of those men employing their wealth and influence on the Company’s behalf. These and the myriad other factors both formal and informal discussed above help explain why the Company continued to hold its own as a viable entity, and even steadily to expand its rolls, even to the 1640s. And, though documentation is rarely sufficient to allow us as detailed a picture, painters elsewhere in the realm undoubtedly shared many of the same experiences. Yet in that apparent success lies a striking irony. Along with densely woven ties of family and neighbourhood, the Company’s strenuous efforts to defend its turf and the dignity of its corporate image also worked to isolate its members from the innovations in both technique and fashion which outsiders, and especially the stranger-painters on the scene, continually introduced, and which the more refined patrons came increasingly to require. In economic terms, it might be said that its inward-looking approach cut its members off from developments in consumer demand, and thus relegated many painters’ employment to the more traditional genres. A further irony may be seen here as well. Right from the start of the Tudor era and beginning with the Crown itself, the trend-setting patrons of the day used their influence and authority formally to extend privileges to the favoured few painters who could produce fashionably refined work at a sophisticated level. While often responding to the appeals of the Painter-Stainers and other companies to restrict the activities of the strangers as a group, well-placed courtly patrons did everything they could to attract individual stranger-painters to their own patronage. They recruited them from abroad, collected their works, and set 112 The

earlier rounds and general lines of the discussion are nicely summarized in Michael Berlin, ‘“Guilds in Decline?” London Livery Companies and the Rise of a Liberal Economy, 1600–1800’, in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. S.R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge, 2008), especially pp. 317–25. Sundry subsequent contributions have essentially been summarized in the introductory sections of Sheilagh Ogilvy, The European Guilds: An Economic Analysis (Princeton, 2019). This has in turn been forcefully criticized by Jonathan Barry for its inapplicability to the English scene: review in Urban History, 46:4 (Nov., 2019), 772–4.

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them to painting their portraits and decorating their palaces and great country houses, and they did so in a crescendo of frequency and energy dramatically climaxing in the person of Charles I. A final irony lies in the fact that, while the sophisticated English lay patron did everything possible in the early seventeenth century to attract the best of continental painters, no government at any level did as much as it might have to support English painters as a group. Craft industries like painting were not considered sufficiently important to warrant the same sort of proactive support which had been extended to those, from fishing to sailcloth, copper mining to the new draperies, deemed essential to the welfare and security of the nation.113 Yet models of what might have been done at various levels of government were not far to seek. Dutch and Flemish governments at all levels had been much more enterprising in recognizing painting for its economic and even its political value, thus supporting myriad painters: commissioning, disseminating, and publicly displaying their works, even in times of civic strife. They also did so by strengthening the guilds from whom they gained political support in return. Those same Dutch guilds which spawned so many of England’s stranger-painters had long worked to develop facilities like corporate salesrooms and auctions where paintings could be displayed for purchase, and they even extended efforts to educate potential patrons.114 Nothing remotely like this could be said of the governments of England, London, or provincial centres, or of London’s Painter-Stainers. The consequences of such actions and inactions were most apparent when the consumer demand for easel portraiture reached fever pitch under Charles I. While in the Netherlands even refugee ‘picture-makers’ clamoured for admission to painters’ guilds and were welcomed into them, London’s Painter-Stainers generally saw strangers as intruders to be kept at bay. Their resistance extended back many decades though it is not until the 1620s that we finally have the fine grain of Company minutes fully to describe the state of play. In February 1627, certain native English ‘picture-makers’, some free of the Company and some free of other companies, asked the Company Court to assist them in ‘suppressing certain strangers using the arte of painting, neither conforming themselves in Dewties nor in payments’. Amongst others unnamed, the petitioners included the Painter-Stainer George Cottington and the Goldsmiths Robert Peake and Richard Greenbury: well-established English freemen painters from at least two companies, engaged in portrait work themselves, drawing together against 113 The

seminal works in a now copious literature are Lawrence Stone, ‘State Control in Sixteenth Century England’, Economic History Review, 17:2 (1947), 103–20, and Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), pp. 43–8. 114 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 547–52, 555–64; Maarten Prak, ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Art Market during the Dutch Golden Age’, in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, ed. Epstein and Prak, pp. 143–72 and especially pp. 166–7.

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portrait-painting strangers.115 The Company’s deliberations surrounding that request ensued for several years. At first it refused to cooperate with petitioning English painters who were free of other guilds, though it eventually took up the cause and appealed to the King against the strangers.116 Their efforts had little effect. Even with the restrictive measures of the 1563 Statute of Artificers and other laws still on the books, the Crown, court, and senior aristocracy continued to patronize, indeed to lionize, the likes of Van Honthorst, Rubens, Van Dyck, and scores of slightly eminent stranger-painters. That scramble for the best and most fashionable stranger-painters left most native English painters, and certainly almost all the Painter-Stainers, standing by the wayside. Notwithstanding that setback, and by dint both of the thick matrix of interpersonal ties which pertained within the occupation and of legislative restrictions imposed from without, the Company ably sustained London’s native English craftsmen-painters throughout the years at hand. It could bask in the rays of royal confidence when, for example, asked to inspect the painting of the Royal Barges undertaken by no less a figure than the Sergeant Painter Jan de Critz. In 1637 Company leaders were honoured to host de Critz, along with the King’s Surveyor Inigo Jones, and the ‘Principall Paynter in Ordinarie’ of the Crown, Sir Anthony Van Dyck, at a St Katherine’s Day dinner in their hall.117 And, while serious portrait painters continued to work with impunity outside the Company’s purview, the Painter-Stainers had no difficulty attracting artisan painters to its ranks. By that time, as we have seen, membership had swelled even beyond the capacity of their accustomed places at St Paul’s.118 Some few of its members continued to be quite wealthy: able, in any event, to mingle comfortably with the merchant elites of the city, to hold country property, to be regarded as gentleman, and to contribute a steady flow of silver and gold plate to the Company Hall where it could probably be better displayed after the renovations of these years.119 Yet those same inward-looking forces which sustained the Company’s traditional operation combined further to widen the distance between the native English painters and both the stranger-painters and the ‘picture-makers’. They further inhibited the native English painters’ ability to master the new styles and techniques, and thus to respond to the exploding consumer demand for a more refined portraiture and genre painting. Save for those few Englishmen like Hilliard, who had gained extensive foreign experience at a formative age, or Robert Peake, who sold and presumably read the works of Sebastian Serlio, or George Gower, who had mastered the technique of wet-on-wet application of paint,120 most native English painters continued to work from traditional 115 LGL,

‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 28. Ibid., pp. 29, 69, 81, 82, 91, 93, 110. 117 Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 9. 118 See n. 3 above, and LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 134, 136. 119 Borg, Painter-Stainers, p. 53. 120 Edward Town and Jessica David, ‘George Gower: Portraitist, Mercer, Sergeant Painter’, 116

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patterns, copies, and models. Judging both by their surviving work and the frequency with which painters’ wills record the transfer of model and pattern books through the generations, most clung tenaciously to the English vernacular traditions in which they had been trained. By 1640 few could meet the high bar of continentally inspired aesthetics or techniques; few found commissions from the more influential, trend-setting patrons of the day. The events of these years definitively determined that the Painter-Stainers’ future lay in decorative rather than figurative expertise; more with craft than with art. In the years when at least some people were beginning to view painting as one of the fine and liberal arts, the initiative rested with the strangers and not the native English.

Burlington Magazine, 162:1410 (Sept., 2020), 731–47, and especially 744.

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4 Provincial Painters The most probing investigations of the painters’ trade in early modern England have focused on London and especially on the Painter-Stainers’ Company of that city.1 The inadvertent neglect of painters and painting elsewhere in the realm leaves the impression that any such activity was either unusual and/or not worth investigation. Some earlier scholarship, as we have seen at the outset, virtually proclaimed such a void.2 But just as, for example, historians of English political history moved long ago from a sole concentration on the kings, queens, and parliaments at the centre to embrace the additional dynamics of locality and region, so must the study of particular occupations like painting move as well. Even when concentrating exclusively on portraiture, no less a curatorial authority than Sir Roy Strong has suggested the potential at least of regional painting as a worthy subject for study.3 Tightly focused but still valuable investigations have been made of local painting in provincial centres like Norwich,4 Bury St Edmunds,5 Gloucester,6 and 1 W.A.D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1923) and Alan Borg, History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005); Edward Town (ed.), ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547–1625’, The Walpole Society, 76 (2014), 1–236 (hereafter Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’). 2 William Gaunt, A Concise History of English Painting (New York, 1964), p. 15. 3 Roy Strong, ‘Forgotten Faces: Regional History and Regional Portraiture’, Historical Research, 78:199 (Feb. 2005), 43–57. Strong’s decision to publish this essay in a journal of History rather than Art History represents an admirably bold attempt to bridge a historiographical gap and reach out to a new audience, but his point may have escaped the attention of art historians and other curators. 4 Notable studies include Virginia Tillyard, ‘Civic Portraits Painted for, or Donated to, the Council Chamber of Norwich Guildhall before 1687’ (Unpublished MA Thesis, Courtauld Institute, 1978); Tillyard, ‘Painters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Norwich’, Norfolk Archaeology, 37 (1980), 315–19; Victor Morgan, ‘The Norwich Guildhall Portraits: Images in Context’, in Family and Friends: A Regional Survey of British Portraiture, ed. Andrew Moore and Charlotte Crawley (1992), pp. 21–30; Morgan, ‘The Dutch and Flemish Presence and the Emergence of an Anglo Dutch Provincial Artistic Tradition in Norwich, c.1500–1700’, in Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Juliette Roding et al. (Leiden, 2002), pp. 57–72. 5 Mary Edmond, ‘Bury St Edmunds: A Seventeenth Century Art Centre’, Walpole Society, 53 (1987), 106–18. More recently the subject has been explored comprehensively in Robert Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraits and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), especially Chaps 1–3; and Tittler, Portraits, Painters and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), especially Chap. 4. 6 Robert Tittler, ‘The “Gloucester Benefactors” after Four Centuries’, The Antiquaries

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Chester.7 But a more comprehensive survey of provincial painters has been lacking. Not all of that apparent neglect has been wilful. The subject admittedly presents its own special challenges. For one, it is more difficult to learn about the painters through their work, as less of it has survived. By and large, the production of provincial painting itself has not as often met the aesthetic standards of paintings done at the centre for the court and aristocracy. It is less likely to have been preserved, collected, or, in modern times, analyzed and curated for the public view. Then, too, much of it was produced in the forms of, for example, wall painting, glass painting, and decorative painting in private residences which are all very difficult to display in museums and galleries where they might more effectively be studied and analyzed. Another impediment lies with documentation. As with all painting of this era, almost none of it was signed, so that one must discover some form of a paper trail to identify the painter. If it survives at all, much of that written record which might inform our understanding of provincial painters’ lives and activities remains either in the private archives of family estates or in myriad provincial archives. Both types of venue are more difficult to access than such public metropolitan repositories as the National Archives, the London Guildhall Library and Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives, or the British Library. In recent years the more frequent closures and limited hours of provincial record offices have accentuated the difficulty of access. And yet, despite these impediments, perhaps a third of the nearly 2,800 named painters identified in the ‘Early Modern British Painters’ database prove to have been based in provincial rather than metropolitan England: a total of somewhere around 1,000 provincial painters have been identified over this century and a half long era.8 While it is true that many of the activities and experiences of the London Painter-Stainers were shared by painters elsewhere in the realm, it is also true that provincial painters experienced some of those things differently or to a different degree. Much of that provincial distinctiveness may be attributed even to such a basic factor as location. London painters worked in a relatively affluent metropolis: large, densely settled, cosmopolitan, and well-served by maritime as well as by overland transport; proximate to continental Europe in one direction, the court at Westminster in the other, and to major roads to the English interior in still others. Provincial painters worked in a variety of locational contexts. Those based in the larger provincial centres, places like Norwich or York, will have been exposed to a greater interchange of ideas and techniques emanating from elsewhere. Yet especially in the earlier years, many painters lived and worked in some very small communities indeed. Given the absence of much regional competition Journal, 95 (2015), 305–24. 7 Robert Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester as a Centre for Regional Portraiture’, Urban History, 41:1 (Feb., 2014), 3–21. 8 Tittler, EMBP.

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and the wider distribution of their clientele, provincial painters in the more rural areas tended to take on work over longer distances than those in London or the provincial capitals. Those same geographic factors worked against the development of specialization within the craft. With insufficient demand for any one type of painting within a less densely populated area, provincial painters resident in smaller communities were more likely to be general practitioners, taking any sort of painting work they were called upon to do. Those who sought to specialize will have had to do so in the larger centres with a greater concentration of demand for their work. England is a relatively small country, but until well into the twentieth century it has always been characterized by sharp regional distinctions from one area to another. The very land itself offers an extremely varied perspective. A mere four-hour train journey west from London’s Paddington Station to, let’s say, Cornwall, begins in a quintessentially Northern European urban landscape and ends in what looks like a Mediterranean vista with palm trees and sandy beaches. To take another example, historians of voting behaviour have long understood English regionality in a quite different way, but until very recently indeed they could hardly have ignored the historic and deep-rooted preference of Londoners and northerners for Labour governments, or of southerners outside London for the Tories. Students, for example, of speech, of custom, of architecture and building, or of dramatic performance have come to understand the implications of geographic diversity for forms of cultural expression. Given these various realities of the era, it seems appropriate to ask whether, for example, the impact of the Protestant Settlement, or the influx of strangerpainters, bore the same substantial impact on provincial painters as on their metropolitan counterparts, and at the same time. Those realities beg the question of whether provincial painters enjoyed the same sort of organizational structure as the London Painter-Stainers, or whether they went about their business in the same manner. They raise as well the question of receptivity to innovation, and the dynamics of cultural communication between the centre and the periphery. These are some of the questions to which we now turn. Let us begin with a broad caveat. None of these factors should obscure the reality of a continuing, if sometimes delayed, cultural interchange between provincial and metropolitan society. Provincially based patrons often travelled to London and back, making connections to London-based artisans as they did so. Some London-based painters, as we’ve already seen, also worked widely in provincial venues even as they retained their main workshops and their residences in the metropolis. Apprentices no doubt came from one place to another for their training, with the predominant flow into London from elsewhere. Some of them remained beyond their apprenticeship, settled in, and became Londoners themselves. Others returned to their places of origin. In both cases, the ideas, methods, styles, and protocols pertaining to the craft moved around. 88

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From the patrons’ perspectives, and particularly for those who sought to commission a portrait, this was just as well. Not all who came to covet the idea of a personal portrait could easily come to London, or to avail themselves there or elsewhere of those who had assimilated the ‘Anglo-Netherlandish’ mode of figurative painting which, by mid-Elizabethan years, had become the predominant fashion. Nor were all provincial patrons content to decorate their homes with the traditional vernacular, or with the varieties of late Gothic decorative work which had long taken centre stage in residential premises. Over the course of time, an increasing number wanted more contemporary work instead. Yet factors of distance, financial capability, age, infirmity, or simple inconvenience might well make access to London artisans impractical. One solution to that problem of access was to recruit London-based painters to come down for particular commissions, whether of portraiture, decorative, or arms painting. The practice of patrons bringing painters down from London had a long provenance. We have already noted how some coveted figurative painters, Didier Bonayre, Lucas de Heere, Huybrecht Beuckelaer, John Balechouse, and even Cornelius Johnson amongst them, were so enticed.9 The same will have applied to decorative and heraldic works, in which the likes of a Rowland Buckett might well be induced to come and ply his talents. Some such arrangements could be short-term affairs determined by the requirements of a particular occasion. When the grieving widow of the Berkshire gentleman Sir Henry Unton (d.1595) wanted to commemorate her husband with a tomb-portrait on a panel at his death, she appears to have commissioned the London-based arms painter Richard Scarlett, who had presided over Unton’s armigerous funeral, to take on the commission. Having worked up the Unton pedigree for the heraldic imagery of the funeral and presided at the event itself, it was no great stretch for Scarlett, one of the most distinguished arms painters of his time, to extend the heraldic details to the painted panel on site and to add a portrait to the whole. The resulting work, a memorable serial painting of Unton’s life, death, and funeral procession, expertly and intricately depicts the appropriate arms of Unton and those in the funeral procession (see Fig. 6). Yet the modelling of the individual figures, including the portrait of Unton himself, remains well on the vernacular end of the stylistic spectrum.10 The widow Unton seems to have preferred to engage someone she knew even if based in London rather than rely on a local hand who may not even have done as well as Scarlett. Some provincial residents were lucky enough to engage with an itinerant painter who happened to be passing through. These precursors to Oliver Goldsmith’s travelling limner, ‘who travelled the country, and took likenesses for fifteen shillings a head’ two centuries on,11 might risk prosecution under 9

See above, p. 38. Adrian Ailes and Robert Tittler, ‘Arms Painting and the Life of “Sir Henry Unton’”, British Art Journal, 20:3 (Winter, 2020), 12–21. 11 Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (Heritage edition, New York, 1939), 82. 10

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Fig. 6. Richard Scarlett, The Funeral of Sir Henry Unton (c. 1606). Oil on panel, 74 x 163.2 cm. The National Portrait Gallery, London.

the vagrancy laws, but they might also avoid the necessities and expenses of apprenticeship and admission to a freemanry. Some, like Melchoir Salaboss and Charles Gage12 seem to have made a decent living out of their travels; the Cestrian Thomas Leigh the elder, who worked his way up and down the western edge of England for years, certainly did so.13 If, on the other hand, some provincial patrons found these strategies impractical, the work too inconsequential, or the duration required to do it too lengthy to warrant bringing in someone from outside, they had to rely on local hands to do their bidding. When, in 1626 at the age of eighty, the proud Lincolnshire gentleman and former Elizabethan courtier Sir Gervase Holles finally succumbed to his grandson’s pleadings and agreed to have his portrait painted, he dwelt near the remote and impoverished Lincolnshire fishing port of Grimsby. Realizing that he was too infirm to undertake the rigours of travel, and understanding the difficulty of bringing someone all the way up from London, the family did the best it could to find someone nearby. In the end Holles’s grandson located what he described as ‘the best that was in the country’ to do the job. Though we don’t know the painter’s name, we do have the consequent painting. As the grandson noted, it ‘…was very like him, and represents a most comely and venerable countenance’, but it was hardly, in its subtlety or composition, an elegant work by the standards of the day. Instead, it perfectly exemplifies the native English vernacular of its time. In the parlance of that era, the description of the best painter ‘in the country’ meant in the county. In Holles’s case, that meant Lincolnshire. That single 12

See above, pp. 36, 38. Robert Tittler and Stephanie Roberts, ‘Tracking the Elusive Portrait Painter Thomas Leigh through Caroline England and Wales’, British Art Journal, 11:1 (Summer, 2010), 24–31.

13

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painting offers little from which to generalize about Lincolnshire painters, though a number of them have come to light in this era.14 But fortunately, painters’ activities in some other areas of the country may be more fruitfully explored. As a well-defined region, East Anglia offers some important insights into the geographic distribution of provincial painters over time, while the exceptionally well-documented painters of the city of Chester allow the fullest observation of any one provincial painting community. The experiences of painters in both these locales have a lot to tell us about where, when, and how provincial painters worked in the era at hand. As for the ‘where’ question, we may not know for certain in what part of Lincolnshire Holles’s portraitist resided, but chances are that by 1626 he will have been found in the largest and most populous centre of this essentially rural shire. That would have been the cathedral city of Lincoln. That suggestion arises from what appears to have been a geographic consolidation of provincial painters over the several decades following the Henrician and Edwardian phases of the Reformation. With traditional ecclesiastical patronage for painting falling off sharply in and after the 1540s, and an insufficient concentration of secular patrons available immediately to replace it, the hard times which marked England’s mid-century years in general were especially difficult for the rural painter. The ‘crannied hole or chink’ in Snout’s wall will have had to be patched by a mason regardless of the religious persuasion of its owner, whilst the spurt of post-Reformation building, much of it in the form of renovations of former ecclesiastical structures by their new landlords, seems to have required the services of, for example, masons, joiners, and plumbers some time before it required the final, decorative touches of the painter. In one series of building accounts after another, painters appear well after the rest (and not necessarily amongst the building trades when they do appear). Some forms of ecclesiastical patronage would resume. The push for painting the royal arms and the Ten Commandments in parish churches, of which the commandment board at St Margaret’s church at Tivetshall St Margaret in Norfolk remains one of the most elaborate examples (see Fig. 7), moved on apace. Archbishop Laud’s emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ had a similar effect in the following century. But in the meantime, many a working painter in rural England appears to have lost much of his or her traditional employment. In response, many appear to have moved to more urban places, where greater population density held out promise of steadier work. The best evidence for this geographic shift lies not in Lincolnshire, but in the counties of nearby East Anglia. First, we have two reliable population studies of East Anglian places, provided by John Patten on the one hand, and by Peter Clark and Jean Hosking on the other.15 These allow us to assess the population 14 Tittler,

EMBP, vide Lincolnsire in col. D. John Patten, English Towns 1500–1600 (Folkestone and Hamden, Connecticut, 1978), Table 12, p. 251, and Peter Clark and Jean Hosking (eds), Population Estimates of English Small 15

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Fig. 7. Anon., Commandment Board (1587), St Margaret’s Church, Tivetshall, Norfolk. of places in which painters have been located. Second, the Early Modern British Painters database enables us to identify known East Anglian painters by their location over time.16 The results of this exercise may be seen in Table 1, ‘Painters in East Anglia, 1500–1640’.17 It records the painters who have been discovered as working in Norfolk and Suffolk over three different but nearly equal time periods: 1500–50 Towns, 1550–1841 (revised edition, Leicester, 1993), pp. 103–9 (for Norfolk), and pp. 137–43 (for Suffolk). 16 In addition, another study by Patten has very usefully, if in the end not entirely thoroughly, listed occupations, including painters, working in these two shires. Whilst Patten derived his list of painters wholly from wills, EMBP draws from several additional sources (especially evidence of payment for work done) and thus it yields a considerably higher number of painters. Thus, for example, Patten’s will-based study of occupations lists only six East Anglian places with painters in the period 1640–49. EMBP allows Table 1 to list twelve such places between 1600 and only 1640. Patten, English Towns (un-numbered Table), p. 273. 17 Full information for each locale may be traced in the database by using the ‘find’ function to search that place name in Column D. As with all such compilations, accuracy of numbers will depend on the strength of the raw data from which they are drawn. It cannot be said that all possible evidence which might have contributed to the result will have survived or been found. But the research has been as thorough as possible. If additional sources, as yet

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Table 1. Painters in East Anglia, 1500–1640 A

B

C

D

E

F

Places N = Norfolk S = Suffolk

Population c. 1524/5

Population c. 1603

Painters 1500–50

Painters 1550–1600

Painters 1600–40

Norwich, N

8,000

15,000

3

16

12

Bishop's/King's Lynn, N

4,500?

8,000

8

0

6

Gt Yarmouth, N

4,000?

8,000?

0

0

1

Bury St Edmunds, S

3,350

4,500

7

0

2

Ipswich, S

3,100

5,000

2

6

7

Wymondham, N

1,450

1,600–2,400

2

0

0

Beccles, S

1,200

980–1,100

3

0

0

Sudbury, S

1,200

1,470

1

3

0

Little Walsingham, N

1,100?

230–800?

1

0

0

Lavenham, S

1,050

1,200–1,150

1

0

2

Long Melford, S

1,000

1,380

1

1

0

North Walsham, N

800

780–900

0

1

1

Diss, N

800

600–700

0

1

1

Thetford, N

700

900

2

0

0

Mildenhall, S

700

1,000–1,500

1

1

0

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A

B

C

D

E

F

Places N = Norfolk S = Suffolk

Population c. 1524/5

Population c. 1603

Painters 1500–50

Painters 1550–1600

Painters 1600–40

Bungay, S

650

940–1,050

2

0

0

East Dereham, N

600

900–1,100

1

1

0

Debenham, S

500

450–500

1

0

0

North Wymondham, N

?

?

3

0

0

Hackford, N

?

?

2

0

0

Hockham, N

?

?

1

0

0

Blythburgh, S

?

350

3

0

0

Cotton, S

?

?

2

0

0

Thorage, N

?

?

1

0

0

Reepham, N

?

240

3

0

0

Corpusty, N

?

?

1

0

0

Cockfield, S

?

?

1

0

0

Rishangles, S

?

?

1

0

0

Weasenham, N

?

?

0

1

0

Helhoughton, N

?

?

0

1

0

Great Wratting, S

?

?

0

1

0

Wortwell, N

?

?

0

1

0

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A

B

C

D

E

F

Places N = Norfolk S = Suffolk

Population c. 1524/5

Population c. 1603

Painters 1500–50

Painters 1550–1600

Painters 1600–40

Ditchingham, N

?

?

1

0

0

Over, S

?

?

0

0

1

Culford, S

?

?

0

0

1

Tilney, N

?

?

0

1

0

Worstead, N

?

440

0

1

1

Battisford, S

?

?

1

0

0

North Elmham, N

?

?

1

0

0

North Hardingham, N

?

?

0

0

1

Kelsale, S

?

?

0

0

1

Total painters

57

36

37

Total places

28

14

13

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(Column D), 1550–1600 (Column E), and 1600–40 (Column F). This somewhat arbitrary but still revealing scheme allows us to see the name and size of places which hosted painters over the longer span, and then to trace the number of painters identified in each place over the three periods. In descending order of population size, Column A lists all those places in Norfolk and Suffolk where painters have been identified at any time between the years 1500 and 1640. It includes the single regional capital of Norwich, and secondary centres like King’s Lynn,18 Great Yarmouth, Bury St Edmunds, and Ipswich. But it also includes smaller towns, villages, and even hamlets: places like Cotton, Cockfield, North Elmham, and Battisford in Suffolk or Hackford, Weasenham, and Reepham in Norfolk. These lesser venues either had populations estimated by Patten or Clark and Hosking at 300 inhabitants or less during those times when painters have been identified in them, or they were even too obscure and small to have been included in either of the two population studies. They were about as rural as ‘rural’ gets. Yet they turn up on the EMBP database as places where resident painters have been identified at some time between 1500 and 1640. Columns B and C indicate the population of those places when and where it has been reliably estimated. Only five places had populations above 3,000 people in either of the ‘census’ points. The remaining places were predominantly small and rural. Columns D through F show the number of painters recorded in each locale in each of three successive and nearly equal time periods. Column D includes painters whose careers continued to c. 1550, but who had for the most part established themselves at or before the start of the monastic dissolutions. The subsequent period, 1550–1600 (Column E), takes in the brief revival of painters’ ecclesiastical patronage in the reign of the Catholic Mary, but it also embraces the era in which Catholicism once again became proscribed. The last span, 1600–40 (Column F), represents the subsequent geographic distribution of the painters’ occupation which became the ‘new norm’. Many painters’ careers will of course have extended across the arbitrary boundaries of these spans. Where this is known to have been the case, those painters have been counted in each of the two. Given the greater survival of records of all types from the later decades of the chosen era, the expanding national population, and the growing clientele for portraiture and both decorative and heraldic imagery, one might well anticipate that more painters in all would appear in the later period (Column F) than in the earlier (Column D). Such an expansion of a particular craft would conform to one’s long-standing expectations about the expansion and distribution of non-agricultural occupations in rural England. But this does not appear to be the case with painters. Instead, a comparison of the total number of resident painters in Columns D and E show a sharp decline in the numbers of painters in undiscovered, might make small adjustments, it is highly unlikely that it would reverse the clear trends indicated by what has been found thus far. 18 Bishop’s Lynn became renamed King’s Lynn in 1529.

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Norfolk and Suffolk between the first period (1500–50), in which there are fiftyseven, and the second (1550–1600), where there are but thirty-six, remaining virtually steady in the third period (1600–40) with a total of thirty-seven. As one would expect, some of the sharpest declines in the presence of painters came from former monastic locations like Bury St Edmunds. Here, even as the population of the town itself showed a steady increase, its complement of painters went down from seven to zero by 1600, rising only to two by 1640. The former monastic centre of Thetford also showed a population increase, but its two painters of the early years disappeared and had not reappeared by 1640. Even beyond the dissolutions of monasteries and chantries, painters will have lost additional ecclesiastical patronage in the decline of the lavish decorative work which, especially in Norfolk, marked the many pre-Reformation churches of the region.19 Overall, the very last line of Table 1 shows that twenty-eight places in all had resident painters in the first half-century, but only fourteen and thirteen respectively did so in the middle and later periods. The geographic shift of the trade from smaller to larger communities is as starkly apparent as the decline in the number of painters. Whereas eighteen places with populations of 750 or less had a total of twenty-eight painters up to 1550, only seven such places still had resident painters, one in each place, by 1600. That number fell even more to six places and seven painters by 1640. In fact, the number of working painters recorded in these small communities may be even more meagre than the raw numbers suggest. Those numbers include Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Culford, Suffolk, who painted brilliant portraits and still-lives as a hobby but not as an occupation,20 and William Barber of Worsted who died only two years after 1600 and probably worked most of his life in Norwich, where he had held freeman’s status since way back in 1573.21 Yet he has been counted in both periods. If painters did not proliferate in the countryside, did they necessarily go to London, as one might well assume? Was rural England left without their services? Many painters did of course move on to London; at least some others, as we have seen, became itinerants. But the evidence tabulated in Table 1 suggests that a substantial number of painters also migrated from small towns and villages to settle in large towns and regional centres rather than moving to London. In East 19

See, for example, Jonathan Finch, ‘The Churches’, and David King, ‘Glass Painting’, in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London and New York, 2004), Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, and Lucy Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context for the Artistic Production of Painted Surfaces in England: Evidence from East Anglia c. 1400–1540’, in Painting in Britain 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage, ed. Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard, and Edward Town (2015), pp. 194–203. 20 Karen Hearn, Sir Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentlemen, Gardener (2005). 21 Percy Millican (ed.), The Register of the Freemen of Norwich, 1548–1713 (Norwich, 1934), p. 107; Morgan, ‘The Norwich Guildhall Portraits’, 28; Norfolk Record Office, Archdeaconry Court of Norfolk, Will Register Libre 35 (Offwood) fol. 106.

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Anglia, this meant movement towards three of the five most populous places. The number of painters identified in Norwich jumped dramatically from three to sixteen in the second half of the sixteenth century before drifting down to twelve in the latter years. None seem to have gone immediately to King’s Lynn, but six had turned up there by 1640, whilst the number of painters in Ipswich rose from two to six to seven over the three time periods at hand. A curious anomaly appears in the case of Great Yarmouth, the third largest and most important town of the shire. No resident painters between 1500 and 1553 have been identified there, and one of those recorded between 1553 and 1640 had already applied for a licence to emigrate abroad.22 Very much a single-industry town whose fortunes largely rose and fell with the catch and trade of herring, Yarmouth had a distinctively undiversified economy, and in these years was not at all as prosperous as the rest of the shire.23 Only further study of similar communities will bear out this suggestion, but this may well be a characteristic of smaller, economically undiversified port towns in general. A census of the middling south-coast port of Poole taken in May 1574 identified 1,375 inhabitants and the occupations of household heads, but yielded not a single painter.24 It no doubt applied to Holles’s Grimsby. All three were rough and ready places whose leading citizens may not have had much interest in painting. Though much more difficult to verify, this process of locational concentration seems likely also to have brought with it a greater concentration of specialization. Painters who had typically carried out a wide variety of work in isolated places like Holkham (where the multi-skilled Thomas Bell (fl.1528–32 and possibly to 1541), for example, had worked as a painter, stainer, gilder, and mason) or Walsham-le-Willows (where Andrew Forsette had worked as a carver and gilder as well as a painter in 1508)25 might now be compelled to concentrate their energies in one or two specialities. Given the increased competition of other painters in those larger places, it will have made sense for them to employ that narrower range of skills in which they excelled and which allowed them to be more competitive. In addition, the costs of setting up shop and household in a new locale may have been prohibitive for the small painter. He may, in consequence, have had to give up his independence and work for or with others. We may at least conjecture that the increased work available in affluent urban settings like Norwich and King’s Lynn may have allowed such men to gather together with others in workshops in which each member might at least some of the time pursue his own speciality in a rough division of labour. 22

This was Francis Hillen, who applied for a licence in 1639 at age 24. C.B. Jewson, Transcript of Three Registers of Passengers from Great Yarmouth to Holland and New England, 1637–1639, Norfolk Record Society Publications, 25 (Norwich, 1954), p. 36, no. 237. 23 Robert Tittler, ‘The English Fishing Industry in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Great Yarmouth’, Albion, 9:1 (Spring, 1977), 40–60. 24 Dorset History Centre, Poole Borough Archives, census of May, 1574, MS 92(48). 25 The unspecialized nature of rural painters’ work in East Anglia is noted in Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context’, pp. 200–1; for Bell and Forcette, see Tittler, EMBP.

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In the long run, as we’ll observe in Chapter 9 and has also been noted in the general economic history of the era, the income of the greater masters grew faster and more steadily over time than the wages paid to their employees, thus gradually widening the gap in status and wealth between the two.26 The evidence from Norfolk and Suffolk tells us a lot about the when and where of the painters’ occupation outside the London metropolis, at least in one of the more populous regions of the realm. For greater insight into how the concentration of painters worked and were organized in a particular provincial urban setting, we will do well to turn from east to west and thus to the city of Chester. The choice may seem odd. With a population of somewhere between a third and a quarter of Norwich’s27 and but a fraction of London’s, it was clearly a smaller place than either. Facing, as it did, westward to North Wales, Ireland, and the Atlantic rather than eastwards to continental Europe and distant from London as well, it boasted few of the cultural, political, economic, or social connections readily available to denizens of London or East Anglia. The geographic situation of its hinterland,28 in which the dispersed settlement patterns typical of pastoral rather than arable farming made for far fewer and poorer towns and villages than in East Anglia, had never supported painting on anywhere near the same scale.29 In such a geographic context, the city of Chester became almost the sole focus, not only for the region’s government, but for its economic, social, and cultural activities as well. In more affluent, fertile, and relatively well-urbanized areas like East Anglia, the Southeast, or even parts of the Midlands, concentrations of 26

Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (London and New Haven, 2000), pp. 193–4. 27 Chester itself is reckoned to have had some 4,685 inhabitants in 1563 and some 6,500 in 1629. C.P. Lewis and A.T. Thacker (eds), A History of the County of Chester: Volume 5 Part 1, The City of Chester: General History and Topography, Victoria County History (2003), p. 90. Norwich’s population in the 1620s has been estimated between 20,000 and 32,000 inhabitants. John T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion, and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 4–5; A. Hassell Smith, County and Court: Government and Politics in Norfolk, 1558–1640 (Oxford, 1974), p. 10. 28 Charles Phythian-Adams has reasonably defined this as consisting of all but the eastern edges of Cheshire, parts of southern Lancashire, northern Shropshire, and the Welsh counties of Flintshire and Denbighshire. Phythian-Adams, ‘Environments and Identities: Landscape as Cultural Projection in the English Provincial Past’, in Environments and Historical Change: The Linacre Lectures 1998, ed. Paul Slack (Oxford, 1999), pp. 118–46; and ‘Differentiating Provincial Societies in English History: Spatial Concepts and Cultural Processes’, in An Agenda for English Regional History, ed. Bill Lancaster, Diana Newton, and Natasha Vall (Newcastle, 2007), pp. 3–22. 29 A.D.M. Phillips and C.B. Phillips, A New Historical Atlas of Cheshire (Chester, 2002), pp. 28–31; J.S. Morrill, Cheshire, 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford, 1974), p. 6.

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both patrons and painters could be found in numerous locales. Painters moving on after the Henrician and Edwardian phase of the Reformation will have had a number of convenient options for resettlement. Norfolk (with thirty-one) and Suffolk (with thirty-three) were (and are still) famously endowed with market towns. Kent also had as many as thirty-three. But the substantial geographic area of Cheshire itself had between eleven and thirteen market towns for most of this era, and virtually no substantial urban centres outside Chester.30 Without the same multitude of smaller places to begin with, it remains doubtful that Cheshire painters experienced the same sort of post-Reformation relocation we find in East Anglia and, probably, elsewhere. In the Cheshire hinterland, they’d have had little choice but to settle in Chester from the start. Insular though they may have been, Cheshire area families, as well as its parishes, cathedral, and governing bodies, nevertheless had their painting requirements. Given the character of the area’s potential patrons and the economic and geographic circumstances of the region itself, heraldic imagery ranked particularly high. Compared with the social elite of most regions, the Cheshire gentry were a notably insular and stable lot. Poorer soils and fewer opportunities for the marketing of agricultural produce served to keep land values in check and to undermine the region’s attractiveness for new settlement. Only two Cheshire families bought dissolved monastic lands after the Reformation, whilst the incidence of intermarriage within, rather than beyond, the county gentry remained abnormally high.31 Save for the Stanley earls of Derby, who were as often absent from the shire as they were present, no great magnate families dominated the area as they often did elsewhere, nor were there as many court-connected gentry as there were in, for example, East Anglia or the Home Counties. Cheshire society thus proved famously stable, consisting of families of more ancient lineage and with far less turnover than in most other areas.32 Under those circumstances, inter-family relationships became extremely complex and enormously important to record, exemplify, and promulgate in formal displays of arms. A number of Cheshire families had their portraits painted though, remote from London as they were, most had little choice but to retain local, Chester-based painters to paint them. But they did take particular care with the depiction of arms, so that arms painting came to form an important speciality for Chester painters. In addition, those numerous occasions on which Chester served as the principal port of embarkation for, and return of, English soldiers in the Irish wars, will have provided myriad opportunities for arms painting, especially for the funerals of those whose bodies were brought back from the fields of battle. Like most painters everywhere, Chester painters took 30

Alan Everitt, ‘The Marketing of Agricultural Produce’, in Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500–1640, IV (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 470, 474–5; Morrill, Cheshire, p. 6. 31 Morrill, Cheshire, pp. 3–4. 32 Ibid., p. 3.

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on whatever work came their way, and demands for a wide variety of decorative painting continued throughout the era. But with the principal exception of the portraitist John Souch (1594–1645), most of those who became most successful did so by providing arms for myriad families and institutions. In very few English towns or cities did any painter rise to high political office, but in Chester such posts were held at one time or another by the arms painters Randle Holme the elder (1572–1655) and his son Randle the younger (1601–59).33 At least in their numbers, the Chester painters were certainly up to the task. Following an amalgamation of 1535, they were joined with the city’s glaziers, embroiderers, and stationers,34 the whole company comprising a self-sufficient support system for the region’s visual craftsmen. The painters, glaziers, and embroiderers all produced visual imagery, each in their own medium, while the stationers will have sold supplies like paper, pattern books, and even some of the single-sheet woodcuts or engravings which circulated throughout many of the urban centres of the realm. Of the Company’s four constituent parts, the painters were by far the most numerous and influential. Chester’s painters were far from enjoying the physical presence or political clout of their London counterparts. In most of the years at hand they held their meetings in the Phoenix Tower along the city’s walls rather than in any dedicated hall of their own (see Fig. 8). But their Company nevertheless allowed members to strive towards many of the same ends as their counterparts in the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London. Like all craft guilds of the era, both were dedicated to preserving monopolies of production for their own members, caring for their widows and poor, striving to uphold their standards of work, and representing their trade in their ambient community. However, there were also differences. For one, far removed as they were from continental contacts, and especially from the Antwerp-to-London axis of trade and influence, Chester painters suffered little direct competition from strangers in their midst. They were therefore more successful in maintaining their monopoly over painting of all types, including portraiture, throughout the era at hand and within their region of influence. But their relative isolation from contemporary trends and techniques also left them with a stubborn persistence of traditional vernacular approaches to their craft. The two Randle Holmes were exceptional in exhibiting a keen interest in continental painting and drawing, assiduously collecting prints and drawings and presumably studying them and using them to instruct their apprentices.35 But the one portrait from either of their hands which has now come to light, Randle the elder’s highly vernacular portrait of Sir Roger Mostyn, shows how they failed to translate theory into execution (see 33

Holme the elder served at one time or another as Alderman, Sheriff, and Mayor of the City of Chester; Holme the younger served variously as City Treasurer, Mayor, and JP. ODNB, vide Holme, Randle. 34 BL, Harleian MS 2054, fols 91r, 87v–89v, 156v. 35 Robert Tittler and Anne Thackray, ‘Print Collecting in Provincial England Prior to 1650: The Randle Holme Album’, British Art Journal, 9:2 (Autumn, 2008), 3–11.

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Fig. 8. The Phoenix Tower (also known as the Charles Tower), Chester.

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Fig. 9. Randle Holme, Sir Roger Mostyn (1621). Oil on panel 30 x 24 inches. Mostyn Hall, Flintshire. Fig. 9).36 The sundry surviving portraits done by John Souch, their most famous and successful acolyte, shows in their execution an awareness of at least some continental ideas and techniques which must have been gained under Holme’s 36

Robert Tittler and Shaun Evans, ‘Randle Holme the Elder and the Development of Portraiture in North Wales, c.1600–1630’, British Art Journal, 16:2 (Autumn, 2015), 22–7.

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tutelage (see Fig. 10). Yet his bold efforts to apply those lessons fell well short of a complete mastery.37 Another distinction between the organization of painters in Chester and London lies in the absence, in the former case, of the larger amalgamated workshops of the great London master painters. With few grand celebratory occasions such as accrued in the London metropolis or at the court at Westminster, and few great building projects in Chester or its hinterland, Chester painters simply had little economic incentive to merge their workshops with others or take on many apprentices or journeymen. As we’ll see, the elder Randle Holme’s myriad other responsibilities as a deputy herald and city official obliged him to take on extra hands to help carry out some of his painting work.38 Yet he and his sometime collaborators on particular commissions remained independent of each other, and retained separate workshops all the while. Few other Chester masters had need of journeymen in their shops or were willing to support an apprentice unless he was within the family. Even the most successful shops, including those run by two Randle Holmes, William Handcock the elder (d.1625), William Poole (d.1642), and John Souch, rarely had more than a single journeyman or apprentice at any one time. In this they will have contrasted with the large workshops of the London painters like Rowland Buckett or Jan de Critz, who functioned as virtual contractors as well as painters. Yet odd as it may seem, and despite their small size and insularity, the workshops of many Chester painters endured to the second and even the third generation; the Holmes’s to the fourth.39 How this came to pass, and how the master painter managed his shop, remains to be explored in Chapter 7. The Chester scene offers one additional insight into the activities of provincial painters, at least in the early seventeenth century, which must be considered here. That insight appears in the remarkable careers of Randle Holme the elder and his son Randle the younger, the first two of the family which would dominate the painting of arms in Cheshire and its surrounding region right into the early eighteenth century.40 The Holmes’ careers, exceptionally well documented by literally hundreds of volumes of heraldic notes in the British Library, as well as by materials in the archives of Chester and Cheshire,41 amply repay a closer look. True, the Holmes may not have been entirely typical representatives of their 37

Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester’, 14–17. See Tables 2–4. 39 These included the shops of the Hallwoods, Dewsburys, Leeches, Handcocks, Pulfords, Thorpes, and Welches. Cheshire and Chester Record Office (hereafter CCRO), MS ZG 17/2, passim. 40 Randle I (1570/71–1655); Randle II (1601–59); Randle III (1627–1700); and Randle IV (1659–1707); ODNB, vide Holme, Randle. 41 Especially BL, Harleian MSS 1920–2177, 5955, and 7568–7569; CCRO, MS. ZCR 63/2/131; ZG 17/1; and ZG 17/2. 38

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Fig. 10. John Souch, Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife (1635). Oil on canvas, 203 x 215 cm. Manchester City Art Gallery. craft. Their several successive appointments in the College of Arms gave them a firmer connection to London and a wider regional prominence than most of their fellow painters in Chester or elsewhere. They were amongst that very small list of painters anywhere in the realm to gain civic office in their communities of residence as well as in the College of Arms. But it is the way in which they pursued and juggled their several roles, and how those roles reflected on their occupation in a provincial community, which commends them to our attention. Through much of the Elizabethan era, Chester’s reputation as a centre for arms painting developed in the capable hands of Thomas Chaloner (d.1598). Though his official appointment as deputy herald for Cheshire came only (and ironically) on the eve of his death, he had actively engaged in regional arms painting for the better part of three decades before that, and had gathered around him some assistants to help. Holme the elder, as one comes to know 105

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him, came at the end of what must have been a long line of such assistants and apprentices, also serving as Chaloner’s informal deputy on heraldic visitations of Cheshire in 1591. By the time of Chaloner’s death Holme had completed his apprenticeship and been admitted to the local guild and freemanry. Shortly thereafter he married Chaloner’s widow, probably inheriting substantial resources in the bargain, took on Chaloner’s son Jacob as an apprentice, and signed a long-term lease on a house for his new family.42 This substantial edifice served as both residence and workshop for the rest of his life. It may still be seen in the form of what is now known as Ye Olde King’s Head in Lower Bridge Street at the northwest corner of Castle Lane (see Fig. 11). Thus established both professionally and domestically, Holme’s career grew by leaps and bounds. By 1600 Norroy King of Arms appointed him Deputy Herald for Cheshire, Lancashire, and North Wales, an appointment which was confirmed or re-defined several times in years to come. If the number of his surviving signatures on funeral certificates of the regional gentry or his preparation of pedigree rolls for the same clientele is characteristic of the rest of his heraldic work, Holme took his duties very seriously indeed.43 His election as city Alderman in 1604 inaugurated a long career in the city’s administration which would come to include stints as Sheriff (1628/9) and Mayor (1633/4) of Chester.44 Holme’s heraldic responsibilities placed him at the crossroads between the region’s landed gentry – that particular social group most likely to require a painter’s services – in one direction and its painting community in the other. His office required a constant and close familiarity with the arms-bearing families of his assigned region: weighing claims to armigerous status, recording births, signing death and marriage certificates, arranging heraldic funerals, and conducting the genealogical research to support the rest.45 Aside from their implications for the painting of arms, these activities also marked those passages of life which invited a portrait record. Whether for easel portraiture or funerary images, or for decorative work of all sorts in their houses, it is these gentry families of the Chester hinterland, along with some parish churches, city officials, and benefactors, which provided the most demand for Chester’s painters.46 42

ODNB, vide Holme, Randle. Well over 100 funeral certificates bearing Holme’s signatures are printed in J.P. Rylands (ed.), Cheshire and Lancashire Funeral Certificates: A.D.1600 to 1678, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 6 (1882), passim. A list of pedigree rolls with Holme’s signature may be found in Michael Powell (ed.), Welsh Pedigree Rolls (Aberystwyth, 1996), pp. 9, 33–5. 44 ODNB, vide Holme, Randle. 45 S. Friar, The Sutton Companion to Heraldry (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1992 and 2004), pp. 8–10; G.D. Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds of Chester’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological and Historic [sic] Society, 56 (1969), 24–8. 46 In addition to the portraits of mayors and benefactors noted above, portraits of the barons of the Exchequer of the Palatinate of Chester had been done prior to 1600 and displayed in 43

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Fig. 11. Randle Holme’s residence (‘Ye Olde King’s Head’), Lower Bridge Street, Chester, c. 1620s, with twentieth-century renovations.

The elder Holme took on some of this himself. We know that he painted a great many armorial hatchments and associated regalia: some for armigerous families, some for local churches, and some for civic institutions. We also know that he painted a variety of wooden posts and sword rests, pulpits and font covers, and other ecclesiastical and civic paraphernalia.47 Collaborating with a few other master painters he maintained long-standing arrangements to paint the play figures in the city’s annual mayoral procession48 and to maintain the painted work in his parish church of St Mary on the Hill.49 We also now know that he painted the Mostyn easel portrait, which he signed with his initials in

Chester Castle. In 1624, acting as Chamberlain of the Palatinate, the earl of Derby admonished Randle Holme I for neglecting and misplacing them. Letter from Derby to Holme, 16 Sept. 1624, CCRO, MS ML/6/166. 47 ODNB, vide Holme, Randle the elder; J.P. Earwaker, ‘The Four Randle Holmes of Chester Antiquaries, Heralds, and Genealogists, c.1571 to 1707’, Chester Archaeological Society Journal (1890/91), 115; Michael Powell Siddons, Welsh Pedigree Rolls (Aberystwyth, 1996); The Victoria History of the County of Chester, (1979–2005), Vol. 5 pt 2, p. 147. 48 Holme collaborated in this with the Chester masters William Handcock, Nicholas Hallwood, and Robert Thornley; Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills (eds), Records of Early English Drama: Cheshire including Chester (2 vols, London and Toronto, 2007), pp. 425–6, 505–6. 49 Churchwardens’ Accounts, St Mary on the Hill, CCRO, MS P 29/7/2 et passim.

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three places on the panel.50 While he collaborated with other Chester master painters on particular assignments, he also appears to have passed some of the work for gentry clients on to his former apprentices. Despite his prominence and the multiplicity of his responsibilities, Holme’s workshop remained small compared to those of the celebrity painters in London and at court. In a career spanning more than half a century he took on but nine apprentices,51 including two sons and his step-son Jacob Chaloner (see Table 2 below) and employed nine journeymen (see Table 3 below), almost all of them for but a single year.52 Though we might consider them few in number, Holme appears to have taught the apprentices well, probably employing as a teaching device the many prints and drawings which he, and later his son, assiduously collected over the years.53 At least five of them completed their apprenticeships, which was higher than the average rate of completion. Though William Holme became a Chester Stationer rather than a painter, Jacob Chaloner used his training to support a successful career in London and Edward Bellin, John Souch, and Randle Holme the younger became some of Chester’s most prominent painters in years to come. Holme actively assisted these acolytes in getting their careers off the ground thereafter. He sponsored their admission to the fellowship of the Company, and thus to the freemanry of the city of Chester. He then recommended their services as painters to the very same gentry families with whom his heraldic responsibilities kept him in close touch: a boon of which John Souch was the principal beneficiary.54 Like his father, Randle the younger became a successful arms painter and an active governing official, serving as an officer of his Company, Deputy Herald for Lancashire in 1627, City Treasurer in 1633, and pro-royalist Mayor during the Civil Wars years between 1643 and 1645. When he failed in that latter year to defend the city from the siege of Parliamentary troops, he was removed from office. But he managed to avoid prosecution thereafter and lived on until 1659.55 Sometime in the 1630s he took on as his apprentice the young Daniel 50

The sitter has been identified as Sir Roger Mostyn (c.1568–1642) of Mostyn Hall in Flintshire, not far from Chester itself. Tittler and Evans, ‘Randle Holme the Elder and the Development of Portraiture in North Wales’, 22–7. 51 Jacob Chaloner (1598), Jeffrey Cooke (1601), John Souch (c. 1607), Richard Fletcher (1612), William Holme (1617), Ralph Hughes (1617), Edward Bellen (1624), Richard Broughton (1624), and Randle Holme the younger (1627). CCRO, MS ZCR 63/2/131; ZG 17/1; and ZG 17/2. 52 303 Jacob de Villegrande (1598), Edward Salford (1605 and 1606), Samuel Harmer (1608), Samuel Hessett (1609), Samuel Parmer (1609), Luke Peake (1610), David ap Robert (1612–14), Humphrey Bennett (1612 and 1614), Edward Bellin (1633/34); CCRO, MS ZCR 63/2/131; ZG 17/1; and ZG 17/2. 53 Tittler and Thackray, ‘Print Collecting in Provincial England’, 3–11. 54 Tittler, Painters, Portraits, and Publics in Provincial England, 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 122–3. 55 ODNB, vide Holme, Randle.

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King (1616–61), son of a Chester baker, who would become one of the foremost English engravers of his time.56 Edward Bellin (1609–50), soon to become another well-established Chester painter, specialized in portraits but took on other work as well,57 whilst Souch became the most prominent Chester portraitist of his time.58 If we take the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as something of an honour roll of important historic figures, Souch, King, and the Holmes deservedly make the cut. In sum, though neither Randle Holme the elder nor his son typify the provincial painter in every respect, their careers do demonstrate a number of salient features of that subspecies. Their dual role as both deputy heralds and painters played well to the contemporary local demand for heraldic recognition and the painting of arms. That role appears as well to have permitted the Holme workshop to guide the careers of subsequent generations of Chester painters, all trained at the same bench and presumably all influenced by some of the same approaches to painting. Their ability to combine their linkage to the College of Arms with their work and influence as painters suggests the importance of such connections for provincial arms painters in general. In both respects each served in turn as the centre point of a complex regional matrix of patrons and painters.59 In these respects, the Holmes may well have typified other elite provincial painters of that time. It seems reasonable to assume that other urban centres will have had one or two painters rise above the rest, and that their careers will have resembled those of the Holmes of Chester. Had their lives been as well documented, we might well find that example replicated in such men as Samuel Kyrcke (fl.c. 1594–mid-1650s) and his son Zachary (fl.1633–73) who worked widely in Staffordshire,60 John Matthew (fl.1578–94) and his son Nathan (cited 1609) in and around Nottingham,61 or the several members of the Bettes workshop in Canterbury.62 One final consideration regarding provincial painters concerns their perpetuation of a vernacular approach, and probably a number of regionally distinctive 56

King eventually worked with such luminaries as the Warwick antiquary William Dugdale and the pre-eminent engraver Wenceslaus Hollar. ODNB, vide King, Daniel. 57 National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Bellin/Bellen, Edward; CCRO, MS ZG 17/2 (unpaginated; see by date) and MS ZCR 63/2/131, fol. 29r.; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 95; John Steegman, A Survey of Portraits in Welsh Houses (2 vols, Cardiff, 1958, 1963), I, p. 207, n.3 (and plate 37A). 58 Julian Trueherz, ‘New Light on John Such of Chester’, Burlington Magazine, 139:1130 (May, 1997), 299–307; CCRO, MS ZG 17/1–2 (unpaginated; see by dates); ODNB, vide Souch, John. 59 Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester’, 3–21. 60 EMBP, vide Kyrcke. 61 EMBP, vide Matthew. 62 EMBP, vide Bettes.

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variations on such an approach, for longer than the more successful of their London counterparts. This follows from their relative isolation from the latest fashions and techniques which emerged first in London, from the strangerpainters who introduced them, and from the more refined patrons of both metropolis and court who demanded them. Not all provincial painters will have had the same ease of access to the better materials available in London, or to the pattern books, models, and treatises which London painters could more readily obtain. The contrast between the more refined painting produced in the centre and the more vernacular output of provincial painters may not be as evident in the production of arms, where standard formats and iconography were well established throughout the realm. But where enough local examples survive from the same time and place, such a contrast quickly reveals itself in the portraiture of the day. Though produced by as many as five different hands,63 the twelve surviving Jacobean era civic portraits produced for the City of Gloucester nicely exemplify the point.64 Nearly all show evidence of painting which was hastily done and thinly applied to the panel. Nearly all employ a palette dominated by the earth colours – browns, tans, yellows, and oranges – of the ochres which were then (and still are) mined in the nearby Forest of Dean rather than the more expensive and usually more stable pigments which would have to have been acquired from outside the region. Most figures lack the use of shadow or chiaroscuro, either of which might have created the illusion of depth. The more refined technique of building up subtle nuances of flesh tones or the appearance of flowing drapery by the careful shading and blending of colour is but sparsely and inexpertly apparent. Instead, figures have been strongly outlined by dark lines, with colour filled in thereafter. Equally striking are the oddly foreshortened limbs, and other anatomical anomalies which appear in all but two of the figures. Virtually all the figures show rubbery fingers, heavily arched eyebrows, and almond-shaped eyes. Though these paintings may have been produced by several hands, they suggest the circulation amongst those painters of the same few pattern books, so that these features run consistently through almost all of them. In sum, it is striking to think that these charming but crude works were painted at the very same time that the likes of virtual artists like Cornelius Johnson and Daniel Mytens were at the peak of their careers just a hundred or so miles to the east. The distance between the two approaches to figurative painting provides the sharpest contrast between provincial and courtly portraiture of the same time. Yet at least for the period at hand here, there remains every possibility that, if other regions were as well served by surviving paintings and archival 63

This assessment of multiple hands at work has been offered by Dr Tarnya Cooper on a visit taken with me to examine these paintings on 7 May 2007. I am grateful to Dr Cooper for sharing her interpretations. 64 All are oil on panel, Gloucester Museums and Art Gallery. See Brian Frith, Twelve Portraits of Gloucester Benefactors (Gloucester, 1972) and Robert Tittler, ‘The “Gloucester Benefactors” after Four Centuries’, The Antiquaries Journal, 95 (2015), 305–24.

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sources as the city of Gloucester, they would display similarly distinctive patterns of patronage and production. Suggestions of such diversity already derive from studies of wall painting,65 and of panel portraits of this same era undertaken in Norwich.66

65

See, for example, the exemplary contribution of Kathryn Davies, Artisan Art: Vernacular Wall Paintings in the Welsh Marches (Almeley, Herefordshire, 2008). 66 Tillyard, ‘Painters in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Norwich’, 315–19; Andrew Moore and Charlotte Crawley (eds), Family and Friend: A Regional Survey of British Portraiture (1992), pp. 21–30; Victor Morgan, ‘The Dutch and Flemish Presence and the Emergence of an Anglo-Dutch Provincial Artistic Tradition in Norwich, c.1500–1700, in Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain, 1550–1800, ed. Juliette Roding, Eric Jan Slutter, Bart Westerweel, Marijke van der Meiji-Tolmsa, and Eric Domela Nieuwenhuis (Leiden, 2002), pp. 57–72.

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5 Arms Painters The practice of arms painting had long formed one of the principal sources of income, both for members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London and for other companies within London and elsewhere. The scramble for status amongst the middling and upper ranks of society grew in these years to unprecedented intensity, and with it came the need to display the armigerous attestation of that achievement. In these circumstances, arms painting probably provided as much employment as almost any other aspect of the trade. Some painters will have done it as their principal line of work, some more casually, but a very large number will have painted arms at one time or another. Their efforts survive in the painted or carved arms on myriad surfaces, in the institutional records of civic ceremony, in the archives of landed estates, and on record in the College of Arms itself. Whether in London or elsewhere, the activity of arms painting had been bringing painters and heralds into close (albeit often contentious) contact for a very long time. Sometime in the 1330s, Eleanor de Clare, wife of Hugh Dispenser and grand-daughter of Edward I, commissioned painted glass portraits of eight knights with blazoned cloaks to be set in the clerestory windows of her ‘family church’ of Tewkesbury Abbey. These glass paintings, of Clare’s two husbands and six close relatives buried in the Abbey, are not portraits in the sense of the contemporary term contrefois al vif: imitations or ‘counterfeits’ from real life.1 That would probably have been beyond the capability of their anonymous glass painter. He would have been mightily challenged in any event to depict lifelike facial features on such helmeted figures. But in one of the earliest known family portrait galleries in England, these were nevertheless representations of real people. Heraldic iconography provided the identities which contemporary artistic skill could not. From at least that time forward, the relations between painting and heraldry, and between painters and heralds, remained tightly entangled. Commissioning a painter to run up a coat of arms or other heraldic devices served visually to promulgate a patron’s social standing. When the Crown, or a guild or livery company, college, school, or civic government did so, it made a political statement as well. The commissions themselves, so critically important to the painters of the era, must therefore be understood in their wider contexts. For individual patrons, that context lay especially in the distinctive social 1 Andrew Martindale, Heroes, Ancestors, Relatives, and the Birth of the Portrait (The Hague, 1988), pp. 16–20; ODNB, vide Dispenser, Hugh.

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dynamic which pertained in England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The extreme fluidity of English society in that era, with its rapid population growth and its unprecedented opportunities to acquire land, wealth, and office, opened the gateway to individual advancement wider than ever before. With those factors came fierce competition for individual recognition and status. To those in the upper ranks, the fear of encroachment from below loomed as a constant reality, inducing every effort to maintain customary social barriers or to erect new ones. At the same time, those scrambling to join their ranks from below, whether within the landed or urban communities, grasped for property, material possessions, and similar talismans of status and legitimacy. The contested littoral inhabited by gentle but untitled families proved especially contentious. Whether through inheritance or direct appointment, those residing uphill enjoyed the social and legal certification conferred by knighthood or peerage. A ‘mere’ gentleman, including the rank of ‘esquire’, had no such designation on which to rest. According to contemporary opinion, a gentleman was, amongst other criteria, one who could afford the lifestyle of that status, and therefore be considered worthy to maintain it. In the oft-quoted words of the Elizabethan observer William Harrison: Whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who so studieth in the Universitie or professeth Physicke and the liberall Sciences, or beside his service in the rowme of a capitaine in the warres, can live ydely and without manuell labour, and thereto is able and will beare the port, charge, and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be called Master, (which is the title that men give to Esquires and Gentlemen and reputed for a Gentleman…).2

In other words, contemporaries saw gentility substantially as resting in a person’s appearance, reputation, learning, and behaviour. Given the long-standing and ambient resentment, for example, by the landed elite of the merchant figure and his urban milieu,3 or by the armigerous sorts of people of those below them, the urge for enhanced social respectability and acceptance remained especially acute throughout the period at hand. 2 William Harrison, An Historicall description of the iland of Britaine (1587), I, p. 128; also commonly attributed to Sir Thomas Smith, who copied it in his De Republica Anglorum; Mary Dewar, ‘A Question of Plagiarism: The Harrison Chapters in Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum’, Historical Journal, 22:4 (December, 1979), 927. 3 On the negative or ambiguous image of the English merchant of this era see, for example, Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto, 1973); Laura Stephenson O’Connell, ‘Anti-Entrepreneurial Attitudes in Elizabethan Sermons and Popular Literature’, Journal of British Studies, 15 (1976), 2–20; John McVeagh, Tradeful Merchants: The Portrayal of the Capitalist in Literature (1981), passim; Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982), pp. 27–31; Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth Century England (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 29–36; and Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), Ch. 2.

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Under those circumstances, social stability depended considerably on a legal and administrative system which could monitor and control assertions of gentle status. The system of heraldry, administered by the College of Arms at the request and instigation of the Crown, was designed to do precisely that. The painting of arms and associated devices served as the visual markers of such status, and over time the practice evolved right along with the system itself. Yet not all such displays were legitimate. By the early fifteenth century the unwarranted assumption and display of armorial bearings had become so common, and so unregulated, that the Crown gave the College (still in those years known as the Office of Arms) the task of reforming and supervising it. Over the next century such efforts proved only sporadically effective. But in 1530 a royal commission authorized Clarenceux King of Arms, one of the three kings of arms serving under the Earl Marshal, to carry out systematic visitations of each of the shires within his jurisdiction, south of the River Trent. Over the next few decades Clarenceux enlisted in that task heralds, deputy heralds, and other officers of the College, along with county sheriffs, bailiffs of hundreds, and sundry lesser officials.4 Together, these officials set out to inspect every use of arms they could find, affirming and recording the legitimate ones, destroying the rest, and fining those who had illicitly assumed unauthorized arms. In the years 1580, 1620, and 1666, major rounds of county visitations were held not just in the area within Clarenceux’s jurisdiction but nation-wide, though visitations of particular shires were carried out from time to time in other years as well.5 In addition, heralds and their deputies received, vetted, and adjudicated new requests for arms from the socially ambitious families of that era. They designed the actual arms for those whose requests they approved. They awarded and designed new arms for each successive generation of armigerous families, and helped design armorial displays for funeral monuments. They presided at the weddings and funerals of armigerous families, so as to keep straight the implications of those generational comings and goings for family pedigrees, and they carried out sundry similar chores as part of their regular work.6 Implicit in all these activities lay the design and painting of arms. ‘A Herald Painter’, we read in Randle Holme III’s The Academy of Armory, ‘is such as Paints 4

Anthony Wagner and George Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, in Tribute to an Antiquary; Essays Presented to Marc Fitch by Some of his Friends, ed. Frederick Emmison and Roy Stephens (1976), pp. 229–33 and Appendix III, pp. 252–63 (hereafter cited as Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’); Adrian Ailes, ‘The Development of Heralds’ Visitations in England and Wales, 1450–1600’, The Coat of Arms, 3rd series, 5 (2009), 7–23; Ailes, ‘Artists and Artwork of the Heralds’ Visitations in England and Wales, 1530–1687’, The Coat of Arms, 3rd series, 10 (2014), 69–82. 5 Stephen Friar, The Sutton Companion to Heraldry (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1992 and 2004), pp. 9–11. 6 Summarized succinctly in Friar, Companion to Heraldry, pp. 8–10; G.D. Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds of Chester’, Journal of the Chester Archaeological and Historic Society, 56 (1969), 24–8.

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Coats of Armes on Escochions, Shields, Tables, Penons, Standarts and such like’.7 Holme might well have added window glass to his list of painted surfaces but, as both son and grandson of prominent Chester-based arms painters, Randle III knew whereof he spoke. The items on his list bear close attention. ‘Escochions’ and shields are familiar parts of the coat of arms. A ‘table’ should not necessarily be taken to mean a portrait, as it often did in contemporary usage,8 but also a votive device or memorial for which the surface could be stone, plaster, glass, or wood. ‘Penons’– pennants – and standards were commonly painted on cloth by painter-stainers or stainers. The production of each of these objects required particular techniques and materials. The complexity of providing all such devices for an event such as a single funeral required multiple skills: more, in some cases, than a single craftsman could provide on his own. Such productions encouraged the establishment either of long-standing workshops, including journeymen and apprentices, or collaborative out-sourcing to other workshops and specialists for particular aspects of the production. Heralds or their designates had first to be able to provide an accurate drawing of armorial bearings so that they could be recorded in the visitation records held in the College itself. These armorial field sketches or ‘tricks’, along with genealogical tables, and explanatory prose, served as points of reference for the actual construction and painting of arms. The resulting images could then be displayed in myriad places and on all sorts of occasions as warranted by the status of those entitled to hold them. The armigerous status proclaimed by such display definitively affirmed the very gentility to which the landed, mercantile, and professional sorts of people so earnestly and famously aspired. The award or certification of arms served, along with what Lawrence Stone once described as the ‘genealogical trees and sumptuous tombs […] symptoms of the frenzied status-seeking and ancestor worship of the age’, as the common coin of social status.9 The award of arms had much the same legitimizing effect on civic institutions as on recipient individuals and families. Such legitimation applied first and foremost to the Crown, whose need to legitimize what had essentially been dynastic accession by conquest proved a key requirement of Tudor rule. The first two Tudors in particular were quick to construct a vivid and highly visual ceremonial presence, in which heraldic display proved a central component. Royal marriages and funerals became lavish state occasions, in which a rich visual display conveyed the narrative of the event at hand and, with it, the heritage of the ruling dynasty and its associated nobility. Painters were well and 7

Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory (1688), pt III, p. 147. On the contemporary meanings of ‘table’ in this context, see Robert Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), p. 93, n. 70. 9 Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford, 1965), p. 715. 8

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continuously employed in such work, and continued to receive the bounty of their royal paymasters for a long time to come. Heralds and arms painters performed many of the same functions for chartered civic institutions: the grammar schools, charitable institutions, university colleges, and guilds (including the London liveries), which were frequently being re-established or founded anew in the decades following the Henrician and Edwardian dissolutions, and even entire boroughs, many of which were first incorporated in this era.10 Ironically, at a time when foreign-born and/or trained painters had already begun to obtain the lion’s share of commissions for portraiture, arms painting remained the purview of native English painters. Strangers were unwelcome in the Painter-Stainers’ Company and essentially barred from appointment to the College of Arms. They were in any event less likely to be familiar with the intricacies of English social division. Then, too, the Crown saw little point in employing them to duplicate skills already present amongst native English painters. Strangers could celebrate their patrons’ status by producing actual portraits rather than by relying on mere heraldic ‘captions’ towards the same end, and patrons more readily set them to do so. Under these circumstances, arms painting remained an almost exclusively English endeavour. Painters, including many members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, often received training in arms painting in the course of their apprenticeship. They did so at the hands of masters who were themselves engaged in such work, and who frequently passed on to their apprentices books of arms to use as reference catalogues for future commissions. Many painter-stainers on their own accord, herald painters holding office in the College of Arms, and even senior heralds themselves received training in many of the same techniques, materials, and tools of the trade. These shared expertises fostered both collaboration and competition between the painters and the heralds. From the heralds’ perspective, collaboration became essential. Not all heralds by any means had the inclination, time, or skill to paint arms themselves. From at least the early decades of the sixteenth century the consequent collaboration pertained particularly to the arrangement of armigerous funerals. Heralds were required to be present at such occasions to ensure due process, and they often brought painters along to ensure and provide the appropriate visual display. Similar collaboration ensued on heraldic visitations, in which a painter frequently rode through a county with a particular herald. 10 Robert

Tittler, ‘The Incorporation of Boroughs, 1540–1558’, History, 62:204 (Feb., 1977), 24–42; Tittler, The Reformation and the Towns in England: Politics and Political Culture, c. 1540–1640 (Oxford, 1998), especially pp. 87–96. An excellent example of what a herald did on visitation in a particular town may be found in the records of the Burghmote Court of Maidstone, in which the 1619 visitation of the herald John Philipot and his thorough search of the arms and mottoes of the borough, are closely described. Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, MS MD/ACM1/2.

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Some heralds were talented enough as painters to enjoy parallel careers in the two occupations, occasionally even as portrait painters, and even at the highest level of skill and patronage. The remarkable Henry Lilly, who lost his parents at the age of six and learned to paint as an orphan in the Bridewell, was one of several men of rank in both the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London and the College of Arms. His ability as an arms painter remains beyond question: he gained a wide contemporary reputation for the exceptional quality of his work.11 But the press of that work, along with his other responsibilities, led him to employ others and to take on as many apprentices as the Company by-laws allowed.12 As the Company clerk of the day remained lax in noting the registration of apprentices, we do not have a reliable list of such associations. But we do know that Lilly served as master to John Allen prior to 1625–2613 and to Henry Manning (fl. 1630s)14 and William Sedgwick (1617–51)15 in the 1630s – the latter two becming prominent arms painters in their own right – and that he employed the young Chester-trained arms painter Jacob Chaloner in the 1620s.16 Hard-pressed heralds like Lilly kept their eye out for young painters whom they could employ inexpensively as journeymen before those novices were able to obtain commissions on their own. William Sedgwick was still a teenager when Lilly found him.17 He came to work for Lilly for two years before leaving for the greener pastures of employment by Sir Christopher Hatton at the still 11

Thomas Woodcock, ‘Henry Lilly’, ODNB; Lilly served on the Company’s Court of Assistants, 1635–37 whilst serving as Rouge Croix Pursuivant from 1634. He was promoted to Rouge Dragon in 1638, after which he was sometimes known in Company minutes as ‘Rouge Rose’; Guildhall Library of London, Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book, MS CLC/L/ PA/B/001/05667/001 (hereafter cited as ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’), see pp. 125 ff. 12 According to the by-laws of 1582, no member of the Company should have more than two apprentices at a time, save for Masters and Wardens, who were allowed three. City of London, Livery Companies’ Commission, Reports and Appendix, III, (1884), p. 618, item 15. 13 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, pp. 17 and 152; Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005), (Hereafter Borg, Worshipful Company of Painters), p. 210; Richard Cust and Andrew Hopper (eds), Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, 1634–1640, Harleian Society Publications, n.s., 18 (2006), pp. 150–1, ‘King of Arms v. Painters and Stainers’; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 27; The College of Arms, ‘Painters’ Workbook MS O.02 1634–1689’, passim, and MS I 3, Chapter Book, passim. 14 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 107; College of Arms, ‘Painters’ Workbook’ MS O.02, 1634–1689’, vide by year; Thomas Woodcock, ‘Henry Lilly’, ODNB. 15 Sedgwick described his employment under Lilly in his deposition in the case of Duck vs. Woodall, in G.D. Squibb (ed.), Reports of Heraldic Cases in the Court of Chivalry, 1623–1732, Harleian Society Publications, 108 (1956), p. 40. 16 Michael Powell Siddons, Welsh Pedigree Rolls (Aberystwyth, 1996), pp. 8, 26–7; Michael Powell Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry (3 vols, Aberystwyth, 1991–3), I, pp. 51, 305, 318; BL, Harleian MS 1091; BL Additional MSS 26704, 5213, and 47185; Chester Record Office, MS ZG 17/1 (unpaginated; see by date); LGL, MS 11571/10, p. 104; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 53; Anthony Richard Wagner (ed.), A Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms (Oxford, 1950), p 140. 17 Squibb, Reports of Heraldic Cases, p. 40.

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tender age of twenty-three.18 The Chester-trained Chaloner had more experience when he signed on with Lilly, but he was new to the London scene and would have welcomed Lilly’s support. Even more prominent in maintaining such a double-career was William Segar (c.1564–1633), probably born in England and of Dutch heritage. Segar initially trained as a scrivener, another skill appropriate to the herald’s work, and became free of the Scriveners’ Company of London. He landed the post of Portcullis Pursuivant in the College of Arms in 1585 at the age of twenty-one, moved up the ladder of College offices to Somerset Herald in 1589, Norroy King of Arms (one of three kings of arms, the highest position in the College) in 1597, and then to Garter King of Arms in 1604. Though he came into disfavour and was briefly imprisoned for granting arms to a bogus claimant, he was eventually restored to James I’s good graces. He subsequently received his own coat of arms in 1612 and a knighthood in 1616. Segar was never a Painter-Stainer but he must still be counted amongst the more prominent English-born portrait painters of his generation. Amongst works confidently attributed to him are portraits of the earl of Leicester; the earl of Essex; Francis, the countess of Essex; and Queen Elizabeth herself.19 Yet he also retained a keen and active interest in heraldry throughout his life, collecting books of arms, writing heraldic treatises, and painting arms.20 Another herald and skilled painter, Edward Norgate (1581–1650), was even more the polymath. He was also an accomplished musician and calligrapher. He served as an agent in the purchase of paintings abroad for Queen Henrietta Maria and the earl of Arundel, and as tutor to Arundel’s sons. His broad skills brought him to the attention of the Caroline court circle, and to an appointment in the College of Arms, first as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and then Windsor Herald. It is some sign of his standing in the eyes of other painters that he was an invited guest in November 1637, when the London Painter-Stainers entertained Van Dyck, Inigo Jones, and Jan de Critz in their Hall on Little Trinity Lane.21 Van Dyck had stayed with Norgate upon first coming to London in 1632 before settling into his own accommodation.22 Along with these sundry

18

Ibid., p. 40. Anthony R.J.S. Adolphe, ‘William Segar’, ODNB; Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), pp. 77, 91; Erna Auerbach, Nicholas Hilliard (Boston, 1961), pp. 271–81; D.T. Piper, ‘The 1590 Lumley Inventory: Hilliard, Segar and the Earl of Essex’, Burlington Magazine, 99 (1957), 299–303. 20 ‘William Segar’, ODNB; Walter H. Godfrey, The College of Arms, Queen Victoria Street, being the Sixth and Final Monograph of the London Survey Committee (1963), pp. 48–9; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 166; Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage at the Court of Elizabeth I (London and New Haven, 2014), pp. 143–6, 163–4. 21 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, 124. 22 David Howarth, ‘Edward Norgate’, ODNB. 19

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occupations and appointments, Norgate also painted miniatures. His treatise on the subject, Miniatura, remains both important and frequently cited.23 Heralds who lacked these skills, or whose extraordinary workload simply necessitated bringing other hands to the task, had to rely on painters outside the official ranks of the College: painter-stainers, arms painters, and other such artisans. In and around London and the court circle such commissions comprised a major employment for the hierarchy of painters working under the direction of the Sergeant-Painter to the Crown24 or the lesser-known office of the City Painter, designated by the London Court of Aldermen to take on similar responsibilities pertaining to events sponsored by the city government.25 But elsewhere throughout the realm as well, painters were commonly employed to paint or ‘refresh’ the arms of individual people as well as institutions, or to do the same with the royal arms which came frequently to be displayed in buildings like town halls, market halls, and parish churches. As the socially driven clamour for heraldic recognition reached flood-tide from the late sixteenth century, the need for painters to ‘ride’ with heralds on their visitations became ever more urgent. From at least the beginning of the century, painters often found employment as ad hoc deputies for such work without ever becoming full members of the College.26 A commission addressed to Norroy King of Arms in 1561 implicitly acknowledged the practice.27 By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign the heralds began to deputize people like the Lichfield arms painter Robert Watson to assist them in specific regions: Watson’s remit included all of Staffordshire.28 Such arrangements did not necessarily constitute membership in the College of Arms as true deputy heralds. Some such appointments pertained to but one or two specific tasks. But all of them provided valuable employment for the able painter. Some of those who were thus engaged enjoyed long-term affiliations with a particular herald, and had done so from the very start of the era. Thomas Wriothesley (fl.1489–1534), Garter King of Arms from 1504, and John Browne (fl.1502–32), Sergeant Painter to the Crown, each enjoyed such profitable 23

Edward Norgate, Miniatura, or, the Art of Limning, ed. J.M. Muller and Jim Murrell (1997); Auerbach, Hilliard, pp. 282–5. 24 Noted in Foister, ‘Foreigners at Court’, 36. 25 Borg, Worshipful Company of Painters, p. 28. This obscure office was held successively by John Thompson to c. 1610, William Freesingfeld to 1623, and Jonas (or Joshua) Carpenter thereafter. Tittler, ‘EMBP’, vide Thompson, John; Freesingfeld, William; and Carpenter, Jonas. (Borg claims, p. 28, that the City Painter had charge of decorative painting for Midsummer Shows and Lord Mayors’ pageants, but this is erroneous; each Livery contracted with its own painters for such shows. I am grateful to Prof. Tracey Hill for confirming this.) 26 In her seminal study of 1954, Erna Auerbach listed forty-five such painters in the years 1509–1603 alone; Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954) (hereafter cited as Auerbach, Tudor Artists), pp. 150–93. 27 Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 231–2. 28 Ibid., 233.

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reciprocal relationships for many years. Browne had worked with Wriothesley’s father in a similar capacity before that. The younger Wriothesley was one of the College’s more skilful painters. He pioneered what came to be known as ‘armorial usage’ on tombs and other architectural features, and was comfortable painting images of birds and animals as well. He painted numerous heraldic devices for state occasions over the years, and maintained a large and active workshop to assist him in such work. Yet even then he will sometimes have found it difficult to keep pace with the demands of work, compelling him frequently to outsource assignments to painters with no other formal connection to the College of Arms. One of them was the then young Painter-Stainer John Childe (fl.c.1527–83), who was already on his way to establishing himself as a leading member of that Company and who became one of the most successful arms painters of the mid-sixteenth century.29 In his capacity as Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick’s association with the painter Robert Hooker (d. post-1595) extended over the latter’s entire career. Dethick (1542–1612) seems to have come upon Hooker in his youth, recognized his talents, and secured his admission by redemption to the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London in March 1578 for a hefty fee of £3 6s. 8d. He employed the fortunate Hooker long thereafter to paint arms for numerous funerals. Hooker was still loyal to Dethick many years later when he supported the latter as a deponent in a Star Chamber case of 1595.30 Dethick’s deserved reputation for being ill-tempered, deceitful, and even violent makes the attachment even more remarkable.31 Some arms painters were eventually appointed as full deputy heralds and did thereby become officers of the College of Arms. The Chester-based arms painter Thomas Chaloner, Jacob’s father, began as a deputy in the former, unofficial sense and ended with an official appointment as a deputy herald, though, as luck would have it, he died on the very day of his appointment.32 As we’ve seen, his apprentice and protégé, Randle Holme the elder, served as deputy over his long career in both the informal and formal sense of the term.33 Some deputized arms painters were already on their way to the very top of their own profession, eventually serving the Painter-Stainers’ Company in leadership positions. The sequence of their careers suggests that they saw arms painting, especially if linked to the College of Arms, as a road to prominence. Richard Scarlett (1537–1607), for example, would employ his early experience 29

Ann Payne, ‘Sir Thomas Wriothesley and his Heraldic Artists’, in Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters. Essays in Honour of Janet Backhouse, ed. Michelle Brown and Scott McKendrick (1998), pp. 146–7, 152–3; Robert Yorke, ‘Thomas Wriothesley’, ODNB; Edward Town (ed.), ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, 54. 30 Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 111; College of Arms, ‘Dethick’s Funerals’, I, fols 118r, 175r, 191r, and 251r. 31 ODNB, vide Dethick, Sir William. 32 Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 233. 33 ODNB, vide Holme, Randle.

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working with some of the heralds to become one of the most distinguished and celebrated arms painters of his era. His work in drawing or revising the pedigrees of sundry individual clients probably came with heralds’ approval. He accompanied Richard See, Richmond Herald, on a visitation of Lincolnshire in 1592, and we know that he often worked with the eminent herald Robert Glover. These collaborations brought Scarlett into contact with an elite clientele, and his energy and talent did the rest. He proceeded to garner a succession of lucrative commissions from, among others, the Office of the Works (for work at Greenwich Palace in 1597 for £61 8s. 6d.), and from several London liveries for work on halls for the Merchant Taylors (for £110 3s. 6d. between 1602 and 1607) and the Leathersellers. He also collaborated with other very senior painters: with John Fryer the younger (fl. 1590s) in 1597 at Whitehall Palace for £57 17s. 4d.; with Paul Isaacson in 1601/2 at Grocers’ Hall for £7 8s. 4d.; and with the Painter-Stainer George Herne (d.c.1609/10) for several Merchant Taylors’ pageants and Lord Mayor’s shows.34 Scarlett could probably have left the Painter-Stainers’ Company altogether and secured a high post in the College of Arms, but he found it more lucrative to stick with the former, and became Master of the Company in 1605. Others pursued a different strategy and used their skills in arms painting to seek office in the College of Arms instead of the Company. Hugh Cotgrove (d.1584) began his career as a painter, but used his skill at arms painting (and perhaps his marital connections to the Sergeant Painter Antonio Toto) to work his way to the office of Rouge Croix Pursuivant (1553–66) and then Richmond Herald in Ordinary (1566–84), carrying out visitations in northern counties in 1557, 1560, and 1563 along the way.35 Whether formally deputized or not, heralds and herald painters operated throughout the realm. Encouraged by the lucrative fees associated with such work and determined to uphold the dignity and standards of their office, they worked to provide arms for armigerous funerals, and often travelled well away from London in order to do so. But the heralds were nevertheless increasingly obliged either to appoint locally based painters to do the work, or to suffer the consequences of local freelancers performing it instead. Loss of income, and 34

BL, Harleian MSS. 1354, 1366, 2021; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 185; TNA, PROB 11/109/123; LMA MS DL/AL/C/002/MS09051/6/33v and CLA/002/01/001, fol. 272r; S.R. Scargill-Bird (ed.), Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon the Marquis of Salisbury, KG, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, III (1894), no. 900; Ailes, ‘The Development of the Heralds’ Visitation’, 21. Borg, Worshipful Company of Painters, p. 196; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 163–5; Roger Kuin, ‘Colours of Continuity: The Heraldic Funeral’, in Nigel Ramsay (ed.), Heralds and Heraldry in Shakespeare’s England (Donington, 2014), p. 167 n. 3. 35 Borg, Worshipful Company of Painters, 196; Susan Foister, ‘Holbein, Antonio Toto, and the Market for Italian Painting in Early Tudor England’, in The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance, Art for the Early Tudors, ed. Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis A. Waldman (London and New Haven, 2012), p. 294; Godfrey, The College of Arms, p. 145; LMA, The Parish of St Saviour: www.persponal.umich.edu/ingram.St. Saviour/Heralds/html; Wagner, A Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms, p. 141.

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possibly the integrity of the whole system of arms lay in the balance. The most scrupulous heralds did their best to root out fraudulent arms painters where they could, but it remained beyond their ability to root them out entirely. Both fraud and error in the display of arms remained stubbornly endemic throughout the era. Even by the end of the fifteenth century, as Anthony Wagner and George Squibb have noted, ‘The growing fashion for quarterings increased the risk of incorrect shields being concocted by ignorant or venal craftsmen’.36 The herald William Smith (c.1550–d. 1618), Rouge Dragon between 1597 and 1618 and something of a crusader in his time, noted that ‘… there is never a shyre towne in England which hath not a paynter or two, that Playeth the herald. As every Esquyres wth Baners, as if they were barons, & let their herses stand in ye churches, in some places a whole year together’.37 In this assessment he was no doubt right. Fraudulent practice was probably even more prevalent, and almost certainly more difficult to police, in provincial England than under the nose of the Painter-Stainers’ Company in London. In some cases fraudulent arms painters worked for patrons who were themselves posing fraudulently as heralds. Through the decade of the 1580s Richard Anyston (fl.1580s–post-1609) painted arms in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire for funerals which were illicitly conducted by the ‘counterfeit herald’ William Dakins. Though caught and presumably censored for his transgressions, he was at it again on his own in 1609.38 Dakins also employed Edward Binks of York (fl.c. 1586–post- 1612) to do the same, though Binks should have known better. He had been appointed Deputy Herald for Yorkshire in July 1600, and would be again, for three years beginning in August 1612. He will certainly have known the rules. But in the interim he was obviously willing to keep at the trade even without a legitimate appointment. Smith discovered and reported him in 1609 for painting arms illicitly in Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire under Dakins’s direction.39 Robert Frere is nowhere listed as a freeman of either London or Chester, but he was singled out by Randle Holme the elder in a 1623 letter to Norroy King of Arms as painting fraudulent arms and contriving pedigrees in Cheshire.40 In some cases it seems to have become a virtual family business. Smith also cited Melchoir (fl. pre-1559–91/2) and Samuel Applyne (fl. 36

Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 229. William Smith, ‘A Brief Discourse of the Causes of Discord…’, Folger Shakespeare Library, MS V.a. 157, fol. 9v. 38 Smith, ‘A Brief Discourse’, fols 12v–13r; Ann Payne, ‘William Smith, Rouge Dragon Pursuivant: Appendix’, in Ramsay, Heralds and Heraldry, p. 62. 39 Francis Collins (ed.), Register of the Freemen of the City of York, 1559–1759 (1900), p. 28; Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, pp. 234, 249, 253; Smith, ‘A Brief Discourse’, fols 12v–13r.; Payne, ‘William Smith, Rouge Dragon’, 62. 40 Holme to Sir Richard St George, Norroy King of Arms, 23 May, 1623 (or 1624), in Letters on the Claims of the College of Arms in the time of James I by Leonard Smethley and Randle Holme, ed. F.R. Raines, Chetham Society (1875), pp. 30–1. 37

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pre-1604–post-1609), father and son, as having illicitly painted heraldic devices at funerals.41 In addition, of course, funerals were not the only occasions for a display of arms. Not all such strivers will have gone to the trouble of John Kaye, squire of Woodsome, Yorkshire, who went to great lengths in the late 1560s to proclaim his social standing in his regional milieu. Kaye employed what must have been a local and not very skilled painter to run up for display a single wooden ‘table’ of no fewer than sixty-six coats of arms representing families and friends to whom he claimed some sort of connection (see Fig. 12). In addition, he concocted his own family arms for both his wife’s portrait and his own which was never approved or registered in the College of Arms.42 Unlicensed displays of this sort on the part of even minor gentry were legion throughout the latter decades of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century, commonly appearing in or on houses, furnishings, and portraits throughout the realm. Legitimate herald painters like William Smith or Randle Holme the elder took their work seriously and were anxious to defend it against interlopers. Both built very successful careers by earning the trust of senior heralds and the armigerous clientele of their respective regions, and by collecting books of arms to authenticate their work. The eminent arms painter John Withie the elder (1593–1677) even paid the arms painter Richard Price (fl. pre-1622–post-1639) to copy such a book for him, expending the huge sum of £20 in the effort.43 Yet however hard they tried, they could never succeed in policing such practices. Then again, not all heralds or herald painters were by any means as scrupulous. In 1638 Henry Parker fraudulently contrived a descent of his own family.44 Henry Lilly himself admitted, upon the complaint from that very College of Arms which employed him to do legitimate arms painting, that he ‘kept a shop of paintings and wold do such paynting work as was brought to him to do and wold not loose the custom of his shop’.45 Lilly later recanted and apologized for taking on such unauthorized work, whereupon he was reinstated in the College’s good graces. By 1634, and despite several further brushes with College authorities, he was elevated to Rouge Rose Pursuivant. But his

41

Anon. (ed.), Wills in the York Registry, 1585–1594, Yorkshire Archaelogical Society, 22 (1897), p. 3; Smith, ‘A Brief Discourse’, fol. 14r. 42 Catalogued as Tolson Museum, Huddersfield, ref. KLMUS 1990/399A. See Robert Tittler, ‘Social Aspiration and the Malleability of Portraiture in Post-Reformation England: The Kaye Panels of Woodsome, Yorkshire, c. 1567’, Northern History, 70:2 (Sept., 2015), 185 and Fig. 2. 43 Humphrey Wanley (ed.), A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts … Preserved in the British Museum (1754–[63]), p. 823. 44 BL, Harleian MS 1163, fols 218–20. 45 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 836, fol. 619, as cited in Thomas Woodcock, ‘Henry Lilly’, ODNB.

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Fig. 12. Anon., John Kaye, Arms of his Family and Friends (1567). Oil on panel, 110 x 92 cm. Tolson Museum, Huddersfield.

willingness to flout the law speaks for itself, and cannot have been particularly unusual at the time.46 Given the extent of illicit, unlicensed, and even fraudulent arms painting, the College ordered in 1618 a crackdown on what were described as ‘Painters that keep open Shops of Armory and do Devise and set forth Armes at their pleasure, assuming the names of Herald-Painters for their more Countenance 46

Woodcock, ‘Henry Lilly’, ODNB.

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therein’.47 A flurry of deputizations, a number of them to arms painters, quickly followed these orders.48 Yet even these ad hoc powers usually fell short of official appointment to office in the College of Arms.49 Whether or not the terms of particular deputizations carried with them appointment to the College of Arms, the best of their recipients made extensive efforts to keep up with the family histories of the armigerous sort of people in their areas of jurisdiction. They kept copious and detailed records of armorial bearings in order to do so. Peter Henson of Oundle (d.1638) in Northamptonshire left an important sketchbook of armigerous drawings which he used throughout his career.50 William Robinson of Newcastle (fl.1619–36), who listed himself as a ‘deputy to the office of armes’, left six books of arms at his death.51 Some of the senior heralds themselves compiled and kept armorial drawings for reference and trained others in their use. Thomas Wriothesley’s Cripplegate house appears to have served as a veritable studio for herald painters in which Wriothsley’s own heraldic records and books of drawings provided teaching material.52 Jacob Chaloner’s several volumes of heraldic notes and sketches go back to his days as an apprentice to Randle Holme the elder in Chester, and perhaps to his own father, and Holme’s mentor, Thomas Chaloner.53 Holme himself not only tutored young Jacob, but also his own son, Randle the younger, thereby establishing the Chester-based family dynasty of herald painters which would endure for four generations. Many of his signatures on death certificates throughout his region of jurisdiction survive to document the seriousness with which he took his heraldic responsibilities.54 Notwithstanding the complex and even litigious relations which often pertained between the heralds and painters’ occupations, this sort of interdependence, and the collaboration to which it led, remained common and sometimes quite extensive. Evidence of professional ties sometimes extended to tokens of gratitude from painters to particular heralds who brought work their way. Not 47

Quoted in Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 236. Ibid., 236–8. 49 Ibid., 233. 50 Anon., ‘Index to Wills Proven in the Consistory Court of Peterborough, 1604–1719’ (typescript, 2 vols, Southampton, 1934), unpaginated, vide Henson, Peter; ‘Sketchbook of Peter Henson’, National Art Library, MS 86.H.H.62. 51 Durham University Library Archives MS DPR I/1/1/1636/R9 1–2. 52 Ann Payne, ‘Sir Thomas Wriothesley and his Heraldic Artists’, in Illuminating the Book: Makers and Interpreters. Essays in Honour of Janet Backhouse, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Scot McKendrick (London and Toronto, 1998), pp. 145–6. 53 BL, Harleian MS 1091; BL, Additional MS 26704, and BL, Additional MS 47185. 54 Well over a hundred of them are reprinted in J.P. Rylands (ed.), Cheshire and Lancashire Funeral Certificates, A.D. 1600 to 1678, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 6 (1882), passim. A list of pedigree rolls with Holme’s signature may be found in Siddons, Welsh Pedigree Rolls, pp. 9, 33–5. 48

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all painter-stainers went as far as Robert Greenwood (c.1530–85), who expressed his gratitude posthumously by bequeathing as much as £20 each to the heralds Edmund Knight (Norroy King of Arms), Richard Lee (Richmond Herald), Robert Coke (Clarenceux King of Arms), Edmund Coke (Deputy Herald for Chester), and Robert Glover (Somerset Herald).55 Yet these gestures were not by any means unique. If Greenwood’s surviving bill for arms painting on the occasion of Sir Henry Sidney’s second appointment as Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1575 is any indication, the Heralds’ favour to him over the years allowed him to work at some of the highest and most lucrative levels of arms painting of his time.56 Yet despite such tokens of goodwill and the necessity of working closely together, conflict inevitably arose over access to patronage. Painters claimed throughout the period the ‘ancient’ right to take on arms painting whenever and wherever they were asked to do it. Heralds also saw arms painting as central to their task. The best of them were determined both to see it carried out legitimately and accurately, and also to maintain control of at least some of the fees which it brought in. Though the collaborative efforts exemplified by the partnerships between, for example, Dethick and Hooker, Lilly and Sedgwick, or Greenwood and a host of heralds, represented the system working smoothly, such good relations were not unexcepted. Whether from the heralds’ or the painters’ perspective, controlling the business of arms painting was no small task. The main battleground between the College of Arms and the Painter-Stainers’ Company took place over access to commissions for painting at armigerous funerals and for civic ceremonies. Both could be extremely lavish and very public occasions. Inaccurate representation or placement of arms could bring sanction and disgrace to the perpetrator, and even action in the Earl Marshal’s Court of the Marshalsea, better known as the High Court of Chivalry. Both funerals and civic ceremonies could also be quite costly, bringing in considerable sums to those who provided appropriate services. The heralds’ concerns over what they saw as intrusion on their right to control arms painting at such events extended back to well before Elizabethan times. They were implicit in the reforms of 1530, and in 1552 a royal writ specifically ordered Norroy King of Arms not to allow any painter to ‘…grave, paynt, sett forth or devise any new arms, without the knowledge and consent’ of himself or his deputies..57 The principle would be restated in June 1561 and in numerous subsequent pronouncements,58 but it never became any easier to enforce. In a petition to the Crown of the mid-1570s, the heralds claimed that unlicensed arms painters continually deceived the Queen’s subjects by painting illicit and false arms, bringing the whole system of arms bearing into disrepute.59 55

TNA, PROB 11/68/372r, 16 June, 1585. Centre for Kentish Studies, Penshurst/Sidney Accounts, MS U 1475/A57 (10). 57 Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward VI, IV (1926), pp. 351–2 (15 June, 1552), as cited in Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 230. 58 Ibid., 231. 59 The heralds’ petition is referred to in the counter-petition, sent by the Painter-Stainers to 56

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These claims undoubtedly bore a great deal of truth. Many painters and painter-stainers, whether members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London or not, found the simple painting of arms relatively easy to do, whilst the models provided in books of arms remained widely available. As we’ve seen, many painters depended on such work for their livelihood. The frequency with which they were enjoined not to do so without license by the heralds also suggests that they found it easy to carry on with relative impunity. As unsightly as such fraudulent arms could be, and as threatening to the dignity of heraldic office, the heralds’ opposition to them probably had as much to do with the failure of such painters to pay fees to them for the privilege of carrying out that work. Whether or not the issue appears in the formal documents, such fees proved a major sticking point in potential collaborations. Under these circumstances, painters looked to their own occupational groups, the painter-stainers companies of London and (where they existed) elsewhere, to stand up for their interests. Painters sought the high ground by citing what they saw as the heralds’ intrusion upon their long-standing right to paint arms. They undoubtedly felt threatened by the potential loss of livelihood. They had petitioned the Crown in 1575 to defend their position against interlopers who threatened both the quality of painting in general and the livelihood of honest, well-trained painters. The particular targets of that petition were the long-standing rivals of the Plasterers’ Company.60 But the Painter-Stainers’ attention soon switched back to the heralds. Their subsequent petition of July 1578 further softened the ground for the definitive response which came in the form of the Company’s charter in 1581.61 Though this placed the Painter-Stainers in a stronger position against the heralds, the victory proved ephemeral. It failed to solve the problem of control over arms painting. Unsanctioned, free-lance arms painting continued, and friction between the two interests soon returned to crisis proportions. In 1592 the Painter-Stainers petitioned William Cecil, Lord Burghley, to affirm their claimed monopoly on arms painting for funerals under the aegis of Clarenceux King of Arms. They even managed to enlist the support of Nicholas Hilliard, by then a very prominent court painter, in that effort, and they appealed as well to Burghley’s son, the recently knighted Sir Robert Cecil. But none of this worked.62 The dispute with the heralds especially simmered well into the next reign and beyond. The College’s mandate of 1618 had made it clear that heralds were not to permit any armigerous funeral be held without one of their number on William Cecil, Lord Burghley, July, 1578. TNA, SP 12/125/28. 60 Petition of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London to Lord Burghley, 13 November, 1575, BL, Lansdowne MS 20/9. 61 Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of Patent Rolls, Elizabeth, IX, 1580–1582 (1986), item 2089 (4 August, 1581), printed in full in City of London, Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix, III (1884), pp. 614–15. 62 Borg, Worshipful Company of Painters, p. 38.

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hand, and that no arms should be painted for such a funeral without license from one of the heralds.63 The ensuing campaign of active enforcement ratcheted tensions even higher. In 1619 an Exeter painter named Hart was sanctioned and fined for painting arms for the funeral of Sir George Smith in Bedfordshire without heralds’ approval.64 Closer to home and at about the same time, the much more prominent London Painter-Stainer Ralph Treswell the younger (fl.c. 1618–post-1623) was fined and imprisoned in the Marshalsea for conspiring to prevent officers of the College of Arms from attending the funeral of Sir Richard Conquest so that he could attend, and provide the arms for, that event instead.65 By 1620 both sides agreed that the dispute had to be settled in some enduring manner. They asked the venerable William Camden to mediate. Despite Camden’s obvious eminence and the deep and sincere respect in which each side held him, it was in some ways an odd choice. Camden was by that time seventy-two years old, in very poor health, and clinging to his office as Clarenceux King of Arms against efforts of the two other kings of Arms to remove him from office. Though he was not, as has sometimes been assumed, also a member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, both his father Sampson (fl.1537–76) and grandfather William (fl.1527–35) had been. Camden would exercise his fondness of the Company by leaving it a generous gift of plate, and the Company had obvious confidence in his fairness and mediatory skills.66 In the event, Camden presided over a compromise agreement in February 1621, whereby eight (and only eight) Painter-Stainers, identified by name, would be permitted by the College of Arms to take on arms painting at funerals. By its terms, the Painter-Stainers recognized the College’s right to regulate the practice, while the College accepted the right of the eight named painters to take on such work. Each of the initial eight – Richard Kimby (fl.1611–post-1638), Thomas Babb, William Winchell (fl. c.1618–37), John Taylor (d.1651), Richard Price the younger (fl. pre1622–post-1639), Richard Munday (fl.1612–40), Henry Lilly, and the same Ralph Treswell – was well versed and thoroughly experienced in the painting of arms, and Babb served on the Company’s Court of Assistants.67 A few months later a further agreement, this one drawn up and signed by Camden and other senior heralds, clarified the mechanisms for assigning painting at funerals and in parish churches to one of the approved painters. It established a formal rota system, whereby the College would assign work to each 63 Wagner,

Heralds of England (1957), pp. 235–7. J.H. Parker Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers and their Dispute with the Heralds’ (3 parts, typescript, College of Arms, MS Her/BH[1966] (hereafter cited as Parker-Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers’), p. 35. 65 Parker-Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers’, p. 26. 66 ODNB, vide Camden, William. 67 College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS O.01, 1619–1634, and MS. Num. Sch. 02/03/007 (February, 1621). 64

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of the eight in turn, and each would be obliged to accept that assignment or pass it on to the next in line. For their part, the painters agreed not to take on assignments out of turn or outside the structure thus established by the College under pain of fine and/or even imprisonment in the Marshalsea. When one of the initial eight died or left his post, he would be replaced by another, the compliment of eight to remain.68 Nothing in the agreement prohibited heralds themselves from taking on assignments to paint arms at funerals. The record of assignments in the painters’ workbooks kept by the College shows that several of them did so on one or more occasions.69 While the arrangement suited the heralds, who could assume thereby to have fortified their authority over arms painting at funerals, it set the cat amongst the pigeons at Painter-Stainers’ Hall. These agreements unfortunately came but months before the Company Court began to record the minutes of its meetings, and so we will never know their full details. Yet there are some intimations that the terms of the agreement will not have been met with unanimous approbation. While this new agreement did serve the interests of eight members of the Livery, it also implicitly excluded all other Painter-Stainers, many of whom did in fact paint arms. One suspects that the majority of the Assistants who will have made that decision were willing to allow a few of their established colleagues to enjoy that privilege as a concession for their support on other issues, but it is hard to imagine that they will have liked the idea itself. They may also have assumed that the heralds were incapable of enforcing the monopoly given to the chosen eight, so that others could continue to paint arms with their accustomed impunity. They certainly must have known that Camden’s ability to preside over the fulfilment of terms would be short-lived. He was an elderly and frail man when he took up the mediatory role to begin with, and he died in November, 1623. Both assumptions had merit. Subsequent events rapidly showed the flaws in the agreement, and eventually allowed tensions within the Company Court to seep into the written record. On the one hand, some heralds continued to give occasional arms painting assignments to painters who were not amongst the initial eight, undoubtedly exacting fees for such favours. Thomas Knight the younger (c.1590–1652) received four such assignments between 1622 and 1625,70 and John Withie received several before he himself succeeded to the eight a few years later.71 In addition, a great many painters who were not party to the agreement continued to paint arms, and even some of the eight licensees succumbed to the temptation to take on such work outside their turn. Such temptation must have 68 College

of Arms, Painters’ Work Book MS O.01, 1619–1634, and MS. Num. Sch. 02/03/006 (1 June, 1621). 69 College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS O.01, 1619–1634, MS. Num. Sch. 02/03/006, vide for 1623, 1624, 1631. 70 College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS O.01, 1619–1634, fols 23v., 26r, 32r, 41v. 71 College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS O.01, vide 1622–1627.

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pulled mightily upon them, as arms painting for funerals could be lucrative work and came with considerable notoriety. In the Elizabethan era painting bills for heraldic funerals ran in the range of £10 to £60 each,72 depending on the status of the deceased, the number of objects to be provided, the cost of materials, and (presumably) wages paid to lesser members of the workshops who carried it out. True, overhead costs could also be substantial. The College assigned painters to funerals all over England, and travel costs had to be added to the bill. Then, too, the work involved several skills beyond mere painting. The erection of the hearse and the provision of the required cloths, tassels, ribbons, banners, and other textile materials were standard accoutrements for any heraldic funeral. Celebrating the great figures of the realm could extend much further than that. The bill submitted by the painters Stephen Rowley (fl.c.1559–87 ff.) and John Whyte (fl.1570s–80s) for what must have been a typical aristocratic funeral for Henry, earl of Arundel, in 1580, provided for carved crests, metal helms, swords and scabbards, girdles, and both gold and silver thread and gilding as well as for simple painting.73 Though they worked together, the list of items they provided will have necessitated more skills than two arms painters could likely have supplied on their own. They may have had apprentices to help out with the painting, but for skilled carving, metalwork, staining, and other such skills, they may well have brought in others, either in their own workshops or hired as sub-contractors. Still, the rewards could also be considerable. Even if he waited his turn for an assignment from the College, the rota system allowed the licensed painters to pass up assignments, so that the rotation could revolve very quickly. In actual practice, several months at a time could go by without particular painters accepting any assignments. One presumes that they must have been busy with other work instead and passed on their turns.74 In consequence, a hard-working colleague could easily take on several commissions a month. Richard Kimby and Richard Munday each took on four such assignments from the Heralds in March of 1622. Munday took on four again in June of that year and fifteen overall for the mere nine months of the year which have been recorded in the appropriate workbook.75 Henry Lilly also took on four funeral commissions in June of that year, and John Taylor took on an astonishing six in the single month of August.76 In addition to the actual monetary remuneration which pertained to each commission, the publicity accrued in serving the highest figures in the land invited further commissions, and were not necessarily funnelled through the heralds.

72

College of Arms, ‘Dethick’s Funerals’, I, fols 113v; 118r, 175r, 186r, 191r, 251r, 263r; and Vincent MS 188, fols 3v, 5r, 9r, 10v. 73 College of Arms, ‘Dethick’s Funerals’, I, fol. 113v. 74 Ibid., I, fols 22–33. 75 College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS.O.01, 1619–1634, fols 17–18. 76 Ibid., MS.O.01, 1619–1634, fols 22–3.

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By such fits and starts the basic agreement rumbled along, with the licensed painters accepting lucrative work on a regular basis when they wished to do so, and passing up their turn when they wished not to. But such smooth operations were not always the case, and the exceptions proved the undoing of the whole. In response to the heralds’ continuing anxiety about the unlicensed painting of arms, and their concern in particular for such practices undertaken by Richard Kimby, James I issued an order on 19 September 1624, to restrain ‘the encroachment’ of arms painters.77 Two days later the Earl Marshal committed Kimby to the Marshalsea.78 He was charged with painting for armigerous funerals without the heralds’ consent, producing erroneous and fraudulent arms, and failing to heed the heralds’ admonitions to desist. Kimby was not at that time a particularly prominent member of the PainterStainers’ Company, but he was no small fry. He had been employed by the Goldsmith’s Company to paint heraldic devices and banners for their part in the Lord Mayor’s Show as far back as 1611; he had worked on other shows with the Painter-Stainer Richard Munday; and he had secured work outside London from the Kent-based courtier Sir Edward Dering.79 The heralds may have intuited that in choosing such a prominent painter for prosecution, they could set an example for others without attacking a senior member of the Company itself. In this they proved right. There is no indication that the Company did much to defend Kimby. He was soon released from prison, and was even given a few further arms painting assignments by the heralds in subsequent years.80 But the example of his encroachment came to be used against the Painter-Stainers in a suit brought by the heralds against them in 1634. Though Kimby continued to prosper, he was never admitted to the Company’s Court of Assistants, and he appears to have remained something of an embarrassment to that body. By 1631 the heralds felt the need to reiterate and slightly liberalize their agreement with the Painter-Stainers. They drew up an agreement which gave the eight slightly more latitude, allowing them to paint arms for their friends or acquaintances in their own shops without assignment from the College. An

77

James I to the Earl Marshal, 19 September, 1624, College of Arms, Num. Sch. 02/03/008. Parker-Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers’, p. 51. 79 He should not be confused with the Richard Kimby said to have died in 1623; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, 123. His career may be followed in the following: Parker Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers’, I, pp. 28, 51–5; LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/, and MSS 05667/001/29, 05667/001//39, and 05667/001/49; Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1558–1639 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 73, 103 n. 44; Jean Robertson and D.J. Gordon (eds), A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, Malone Society Collections, III (1954), pp. 80, 91; College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book, MS O.01, 1619–1634, passim. 80 College of Arms, Painters’ Workbook O.01, 1619–1634, vide entries for 1625, 1627, 1631, 1633, and 1638. 78

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exception was also made in the restraints on the heralds, exempting the Garter King of Arms from the obligation to assign painters in strict order of the rota.81 When the heralds presented this document to the Company in July, the latter merely referred to the painters in question as ‘belonging’ to the heralds.82 The document itself was signed for the College by Sir William Segar, in his capacity as Garter King of Arms, and the eight licensed arms painters were Babb, Winchell, Taylor, Price, Munday, Lilly, Treswell, and John Withie replacing Richard Kimby. Though Babb and Taylor became Wardens of the Painter-Stainers later in that year, none of the others served on the Company Court of Assistants. Babb and Taylor are unlikely to have spoken for the Company on their own.83 Price and Winchell had a history of conflict with the Company. Both had been cited in the fraught, plague-ridden year 1625 for non-attendance at meetings and other offences, the Company Court ordering the Wardens to take them to the Lord Mayor’s Court for their intransigence.84 Clearly the Company itself was not considered party to the agreement. As with Kimby’s prosecution a few years earlier, it must at the very least have been a distraction to the leadership. The pressure brought by the heralds upon the Painter-Stainers, and upon painters in general, continued to grow, as did the divisions within the Company. In 1633 the heralds got the Crown once again to prohibit any painter or glazier from taking on the painting of arms without permission of one of the kings of arms. Perhaps fearing the internal controversy which this would provoke in an open discussion, the Company’s Court of Assistants failed to record any notice taken of this edict. Yet Assistants can hardly have remained unaware of it, or of its intent. In the end it was some of the Company’s own members who did as much as anyone else to undermine the painters’ defence of their right to paint arms. Though the precise timing of events remains unclear, something of a climactic moment came with the discovery that the Painter-Stainer William Winchell, one of the chosen eight of the heralds’ rota, had taken on a commission out of turn and without assignment. Winchell had run afoul of the Company at least once before, and it is hard to imagine that he elicited much sympathy from it on this occasion. In any event, in an unsigned deposition of December 1632, he explained that he had been asked by a Mr Field Whorewood to produce three dozen escutcheons for the funeral of his brother-in-law, Sir William Leigh, of Longborough in Gloucestershire. Winchell claims to have demurred, and to 81

W.A.D. Englefield, The History of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London (1923), pp. 82–8; Parker-Oxspring, ‘The Painter-Stainers’, pp. 59–63. 82 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, July, 1631, p. 62. 83 Ibid., vide 1631. In the following year Taylor would be elected one of the two Wardens of the Company, and is portrayed (holding a scroll of arms) along with his two colleagues in office in one of the Company’s surviving triple portraits: see Fig. 5. 84 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 17.

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have advised Whorewood to go to the College of Arms with that request. But according to Winchell, Whorewood persistently refused to go to the College, and told Winchell that if he would not do the work, then he would easily find someone else to do it instead. Winchell allowed himself to be persuaded. He accepted Whorewood’s offer of a horse and travel expenses, provided the escutcheons, and went at Whorewood’s direction to erect them in Leigh’s hall and chapel. Winchell affected surprise that the family had not brought a herald to supervise the arrangement as by law they were obliged to do. But that was their fault and not his own.85 In describing the circumstances of his employment, Winchell recited a common circumvention of the rules. Like Kimby before him, Winchell was no small fry. He seems as well to have been a difficult man from the very beginning of his adult life. Yet he was well connected through his father’s circle of family and friends and he enjoyed a financially successful if continually contentious career as an arms painter. The fact that he was one of the chosen eight, and that he had already alienated himself from the graces of the Painter-Stainers’ Company by his refusal to attend meetings or pay his dues, made him ripe fruit for the heralds’ picking.86 They snatched the opportunity, and called Winchell up to the Court of Chivalry for his offence.87 On the very heels of that event what should have been the climactic episode in the long-simmering conflict between the heralds and the Painter-Stainers erupted in 1634 with the suit, brought by the former against the latter, in that same Court. The Court itself had been reformed in that year after a long hiatus in its operation, with no less a figure than the earl of Arundel appointed as Earl Marshal to run it. As we have seen, the Company was also in the midst of a reform campaign.88 The suit proves interesting not only for the issues at hand, but because of the cracks it reveals in the ranks of the Company itself. Divisions in Company unity were nothing new. The eight licensed arms painters had already set themselves somewhat apart from their putative brethren by the very terms of their monopoly. The successive transgressions by Kimby, Lilly, and Winchell will have embarrassed the Company leadership and undermined its sympathy for the arms painters in their midst. And so when the Company learned of the impending suit in the late spring of 1634, the Assistants were initially reluctant to launch a defence. In their first meeting of June they warned the arms painters to seek their own counsel.89 In the end, it remains uncertain how far they were willing to go in defending individual painters, but the Company Court agreed to send the very senior figures of Rowland Buckett and Paul Isaacson to represent its interests. They 85

College of Arms, MS Num Sch. 2/02/18 (December, 1632). EMBP, vide Winchell, William. 87 The case is documented in Cust and Hopper, Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, p. 151. 88 See above, p. 68. 89 ‘Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book’, p. 95. 86 Tittler,

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did concede that the marshalling of arms belonged to the heralds and not the painters, and they reiterated this in their 1635/6 petition to the Earl Marshal.90 Having distinguished between the marshalling of arms and their painting, however, they insisted on their right to take on the latter work, so long as they informed the heralds of those commissions. At the same time, not all Company members who painted arms agreed with the Company’s defence.91 Three of the eight painters permitted by the heralds to paint arms testified on behalf of the heralds rather than the Company.92 They no doubt saw this as a means of defending their privileged position in the heralds’ good graces against other painters who wanted a share of their monopoly. Ironically, each had had run-ins with the heralds themselves, and been singled out for punishment in consequence. Despite the fact that most testimony had been concluded by the end of 1635, the Court delayed its final sentence from time to time, eventually scheduling it for January, 1636/7. But no record of such a determination has survived,93 and the Court itself was dissolved in 1640. The case thus disappeared into oblivion, but not without leaving some considerable debris by the roadside. The heralds and Painter-Stainers continued to vie for control over arms painting, their tussles extending during and far beyond the civil wars to come. The Company itself remained divided, yet continued to strive as best it could for unity in the face of threats both internal and external to its membership. Curiously enough, while these battles between the Painter-Stainers and the College of Arms raged largely over the right to paint arms for funerals, arms painting for other venues and occasions proceeded more quietly. Coats of arms became an increasingly common feature of panel portraits from the mid-Tudor years through the early decades of the next century before fading from fashion. While many such representations will no doubt have been painted by the portrait painter from models supplied by the client, larger workshops may well have had an arms painting specialist produce that particular feature. The placement of royal arms in parish churches, facilitated by the declaration of royal supremacy over the Church in 1534 and numerous subsequent injunctions, became increasingly common by the end of the sixteenth century and remained so throughout the era. Though individual commissions to paint and provide such arms might well seem like small potatoes, usually bringing in but a few pounds each, the multiplicity of such commissions could provide a comfortable living for an enterprising arms painter. 90

Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I, IX, 1636 (1869), p. 38. 91 Petition of James Elline, 12 November, 1635, Cust and Hopper, Cases in the High Court of Chivalry, pp. 150–1. 92 Ibid., p. 151. 93 Ibid., p. 151.

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It was with this in mind that the Hertfordshire painter John Sergeant (fl.1603–post-1614) successfully petitioned Archbishop George Abbot in 1614 for a licence to ‘survey and paint in all churches and chapels in England the King’s Arms, with helm, crest, mantle, supporters, and to write in fayre text letters the ten Commandments and the belief in the Lord’s Prayer’.94 Yet there is no indication that Sergeant’s licence had much effect. The painters’ workbooks retained in the College of Arms for this era do record the assignment of particular painting commissions to particular painters, but they fail to mention royal arms in churches. Neither the Earl Marshal’s 1618 crackdown on illicit painting of arms, or the flurry of heralds’ deputizations which followed, paid much attention to royal arms in churches. For its part, the Painter-Stainers’ Company also looked the other way at such work. It was, in any event, largely limited in its jurisdiction to the City of London and the surrounding four miles. Arms continued to be painted in parish churches up and down the land with no reference to the College, the Company, or (after 1616) to John Sergeant’s patent. Most often, and especially outside London, arms were provided in parish churches, guild and market halls, and similar venues by local painters whose livelihood came to depend on such modest commissions: a George Arthur of Chelmsford (fl.1628),95 a John Hall of Long Melford (1547/8–1557/8),96 a Ruben Joyce of Ipswich (fl.1604–28),97 and scores more like them. Many left no record of their life’s work save for payments recorded in the surviving accounts of a diligent churchwarden. Even more difficult to police was the painting of arms in private residences, where they had become common even in such a vernacular form as wall paintings by the early seventeenth century.98 In sum, arms painting proves one of those occupational specialities brought into particular prominence by the social context of the era. The relative ease of its production made it very difficult for any authority to control. Another speciality which was even more susceptible to changing circumstances, and whose technical requirements made it even more difficult to control, was that of the glass painters. Like arms painting, it, too, has been allowed to linger in the shadows of traditional scholarship.

94 H. Munro Cautley, Royal Arms and Commandments in Our Churches (Ipswich, 1934), pp. 35–6; Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM II/13. 95 Rosemary Pardos, Royal Arms in Churches: The Artists and Craftsmen, www.users.globalnet. co.uk/~pardos/Royal Arms3.html (1987), vide Arthur. 96 David Dymond and Clive Paine (eds), The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish ([Ipswich], 1989), pp. 40–1, 59. 97 Pardos, Royal Arms in Churches, vide Ipswich; BL, Additional MS 25,344, fol. 63v. 98 Kathryn Davies, Artisan Art: Vernacular Wall Paintings in the Welsh Marches, 1550–1650 (Almeley, Herefordshire, 2008), p. 18; Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (London and New Haven, 2011), p. 275.

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6 Glass Painters Of all the sub-species of the painting genus, the glass painting of this era proved more distinctive, and arguably more vulnerable to the influence of broad historical movements, than virtually any other. It also required a skill set of its own, some components of which were unique to its practitioners. In all, while some painters-of-all-work, and certainly some arms painters, may have painted on glass at one time or another, glass painting itself remained a more distinct and specialized craft. Despite its very considerable significance in pre-Reformation times, its revival in the early seventeenth century, and its close ties with such other visual crafts as heraldic drawing and painting, glass painting is also distinctive for somehow managing to escape the level of scholarly attention accorded to the other painting genres.1 It is profoundly ironic, as Sarah Brown and David O’Connor have noted, that glass painters, ‘working in a medium which … is concerned with light, should end up in relative obscurity’.2 A number of factors contribute to this neglect. Part of it may have to do with the large proportion of painted glass which consisted of arms painting and which, as we have seen, has also failed to garner much of a place in the art historical canon. A large part no doubt has to do with the destruction of so much stained glass itself during and after the Reformation, so that its physical remains cannot be studied as well as one would like to do. And part no doubt lies in the misleading assumption that ‘stained’ glass was not painted at all, but rather consisted of intricate designs made from individual pieces of pre-coloured glass. Yet this was rarely the case. Almost all English-made glass was white; some foreign glass was red and occasionally other colours. But at least in England, nearly all the other colours in ‘stained’ glass were painted on in one way or another.3 One also tends to assume that ‘stained’ glass painting, not to mention ‘glaziers’ themselves, remained occupationally distinct from other painting specialities. To this there is some truth, though the craft of ‘glazing’ had always involved elements of drawing and painting, and would continue to do so. Posterity has come to think of Richard Butler (fl. pre-1609–38), one of the most eminent artisans of his time, as a glazier, but in his will he referred to ‘my 1 That neglect is typified by the omission of glass painting and its practitioners from the otherwise nearly encyclopaedic collection of essays in T. Cooper, A. Burnstock, M. Howard, and E. Town (eds), Painting in Britain, 1500–1630: Production, Influences, Patronage (Oxford, 2015) and by nearly all other studies of British art of these years. 2 Sarah Brown and David O’Connor, Glass-Painters (Toronto and Buffalo, 1991), p. 4. 3 Brown and O’Connor, Glass-Painters, pp. 46–64. The process is described in Walter Gedde, Book of Sundry Draughtes Principally Serving for Glasiers (1615).

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Arte, misterie or occupation of payntinge of glasse’.4 Traditional glaziers began a project by producing a detailed drawing, known as a vidimus, to guide the subsequent creation of a finely detailed cartoon. The latter indicated the precise shapes and colours of the final design, so that a monochromatic glass sheet placed over it could be cut and painted accordingly. Firing then annealed the paint to the surface of the individual pieces of cut glass. Once cooled, the pieces were framed in lead, and then soldered together with adjacent pieces according to the cartoon plan. All these steps could be done in the workshop before the completed panels were installed in their intended place.5 Though this process required several distinct skills, painting played an essential part. A glass painter could presumably have worked with glass and lead, but he could also paint on a variety of other surfaces which had nothing to do with glass. This had long been the case. The Norwich workshop of William Heyward, who was active from about 1485 until his death in 1506, offers an excellent example. Hayward worked with his older brother Nicholas, a glazier who had trained in the workshop of the glazier Thomas Goldbeater (d.1467) and wound up living in Goldbeater’s house. William’s workshop has now at least speculatively been credited with producing painted glass, but it also produced painted wood panels, wall paintings, and even funerary brasses for which a drawn or painted design will have served as a guide.6 While a few master painters could take on both the design and manufacturing of painted glass, the processes were sufficiently distinct so as to be more often carried out separately. Master glaziers did the preparatory videmus and the cartoons drawn from them, but they rarely painted on glass, leaving it to the shop’s painters.7 That level of versatility in a single workshop required considerable capital equipment and several hands at work. Ideally, such workshops will have been larger than most of those required by the painter-of-all-work. Yet finding the right hands could be challenging. Not everyone had a well-trained brother with whom to collaborate. Their high drop-out rate, along with the time it took to train them, made it hard to count on apprentices. In any event, municipal ordinances commonly limited the permissible number of apprentices or journeymen worked to limit the size of such operations.8 The completion of 4

Will of Richard Butler, TNA, PROB 11/178/669. Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (1993), pp. 31–6; Mary Brian Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists in Early Modern England, Collaboration and Competition, 1460–1680 (Farnham, Surrey, 2010), p. 48. 6 R. Greendoor and M. Norris, The Brasses of Norfolk Churches (Woodbridge, 1976), pp. 28–32; David King, ‘A Multi-Media Workshop in Late Medieval Norwich: A New Look at William Heyward’, in Lumièries, formes et couleurs: Mélanges en hommage à Yvette Vanden Bemden, ed. Claire de Ruyt, Isabelle Lecocq, Michel Lefftz, and Mathieu Piavaux (Namur, 2008), pp. 193–204. 7 Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 28, 46. 8 For example, the 1582 Ordinances of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, reprinted in London Livery Companies’ Commission, Report and Appendix (4 vols, 1883), III, pp. 615–22. 5

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large commissions will therefore frequently have required collaboration between shops or even between crafts,9 making glass painting a more frequently collaborative enterprise than other forms of painting. In addition, the complexity of workshop equipment, and the expense required to obtain it, proved powerful incentives to keep a workshop running for as long as possible. Under these circumstances, glaziers’ and glass painters’ shops in London and elsewhere were likely to become family concerns, extending their operation over several decades and accumulating capital equipment and pattern books along the way.10 In glass-painting centres like York, families like the Pettys, Inglises, Thompsons, and Prestons perpetuated their workshops even over multiple generations. Richard Thompson and his son William ran a successful workshop in York between about 1496 and 1539.11 Matthew Petty of York (d.1478) was established as a glazier by 1446, and possibly even by 1437, and left his shop at his death to his sons John (fl.1470–1508) and Robert (fl. 1481–1528). Robert’s death finally brought the shop to an end after at least eighty-two years in the same family. Something of the family’s reputation and success may be measured in John Petty’s elevation to local government office: he served as chamberlain, sheriff, alderman, and (in the year of his death, 1508) mayor of York.12 Within a few years thereafter a portrait of John in glass, kneeling in his mayoral robes before the image of the Virgin and Child, was carried out in the south transept façade of York Minster, probably by Robert.13 When the male line of a glass-painting family came to an end, extensive efforts could be made to keep a workshop going in the hands of spouses and apprentices. Robert Lee, whose long career as an Essex painter and glazier extended from at least 1562 to his death in 1597, had no surviving children, but he wanted badly to keep his two shops in operation. He therefore willed to his former apprentice William Eve thone halfe of all my working tooles aswell for glasinge as payntings, so as the said William shall ioyne and become partner with Emme my wife in the trade which I nowe use, and so to continue with her and the profit rising and compinge of an upon my two shoppes.

9 Curd,

Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 51–7. John Knowles, ‘Glass-Painters of York’, Notes and Queries, 12th series, 148 (12 Feb. 1921), 127–30; 158 (23 April, 1921), 323–5; 160 (7 May, 1921), 364–7; 162 (21 May, 1921), 406–8; 166 (18 June, 1921), 485–7; 169 (9 July, 1921), 21–2; 171 (23 July, 1921), 61–4; and 173 (6 Aug., 1921), 103–4. 11 John Knowles, ‘Glass-Painters of York’, Notes and Queries, 12th series, 176 (27 August, 1921), 163–5. 12 Knowles, ‘Glass-Painters of York’, 12th series, 166 (18 June, 1921), 486; D.M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), pp. 172, 294; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 42. 13 David O’Connor, ‘John Petty, Glazier and Mayor of York: An Early 16th-Century Memorial Window in the South Transept of York Minster’, Journal of Stained Glass, 29 (2005), 30–44. 10

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In addition, he willed 20s. to his current apprentice, a John Backson, if Backson would well and duetifully serve out the same with my said wife in such sorte as he ought to have served out the same with me yf I had lived’.14

Towards the same end, the Sussex glass painter Henry Harye (or Harry) left his shop and equipment to his nephew instead of his son when the latter proved unwilling or unable to take it over himself.15 Both within and outside family connections, the personal relations amongst native English glass painters and glaziers tended to be close and long-standing. John Knowles commented long ago on the frequency with which York glass painters are mentioned in the wills of others in that trade, and he noted cases where friendships amongst apprentices led to long collaborations in subsequent years. He very usefully traced the descent of the glazier’s and glass painter’s workshop, estimated to have been established around 1400, which came to William Inglis in the mid-fifteenth century. Inglis (d.1480) trained both his own son Thomas Inglis and Robert Preston, the latter the scion of yet another glasspainting family of York. After William Inglis’s death in 1480, Thomas Inglis and Robert Preston kept up the shop in partnership, though Preston’s other involvement in the government and merchant life of that city made Thomas Inglis the more active partner. Still, Preston brought connections, and perhaps collaboration, with the Petty brothers: John Petty (who may have been Preston’s brother-in-law) and thus to Petty’s own brother Robert, also a glass painter. Preston also trained Robert Begge, who became a freeman glass painter of York in 1504, and he left Begge his pattern books and various tools and pieces of equipment. Thomas Inglis and Robert Preston willed their tools and stock to others in that long chain, ensuring continuity from one generation to the next.16 Of course, the strategies designed to keep a workshop running over successive generations could also be found in the more mainstream elements of the painters’ trade. As we’ll see in the chapter on workshop personnel which follows, the well-documented operation of the painters’ trade in Chester, for example, brings several additional examples of this strategy,17 and it was certainly employed by London painter-stainers as well. But given the larger scale of some glaziers’ workshops and the wider range of their required equipment, 14

The will was proven on 20 September, 1597. Westminster City Archives, ACC 120/Elsam Register fol. 268v. I am grateful to Edward Town for this reference. For Lee’s earlier work, see Essex County Record Office, MS D P/94/5/1, fol. 22. 15 Will of Henry Harye, glasier and glass painter; TNA PROB 11/45/73 (14 March, 1562), as cited in Gill Draper, ‘Harry the Glasyer of Rye: Making and Replacing Stained Glass in Churches on the Kent and Sussex Borders in the Sixteenth Century’, Vidimus, 65 (Jan., 2013), unpaginated ‘Feature’. 16 Knowles, ‘Glass Painters of York’, Notes and Queries, 12th series, 158 (23 April, 1921), 324–5; 166 (18 June, 1921), 485–6; 169 (23 July, 1921), 61–3 and 173 (6 August, 1921), 104–6. 17 See below, p. 162.

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glaziers and glass painters may have placed more emphasis on continuity than other painters. Over the course of the sixteenth century, technological and stylistic innovations, along with the impact of the Reformation itself, accentuated the bifurcation of labour in the traditional glazier’s craft. During the fifteenth century, the introduction, by well-patronized immigrant glass painters, of long narrative stories extending over several adjacent glass panels placed more emphasis on the painting and the painter’s skills than the traditional English practice of one panel per story. In this they particularly followed the lead of the innovative Antwerp glass painter Arnold van Ort (d.c. 1540) who fostered the creation of what Mary Curd describes as ‘painterly, narrative windows’. Van Ort is also credited with inventing the technique of painting the glass with coloured enamels and then annealing it, which soon became the standard means of production.18 Another innovation lay in the drilling of jewelled inserts into the glass, a technique more appropriate to the glaziers than to the painters.19 Insofar as it applied to these large figurative works, these emerging fashions and techniques encouraged a more pronounced division of labour between the painter and the glazier. It left the business of cutting, framing, and installing glass panels to the glaziers, and thereby nudged the glass painters to find their affinity with other painters. When the new fashion for large, serial panels struck a chord with affluent English patrons from the Crown on down, English glass painters were compelled to follow the strangers’ lead as best they could.20 In the pre-Reformation years, the display of stained glass will have been the pride of many an English parish church, but it was the Crown which served as the most active single patron for stained glass. The many building projects especially of the first two Tudors required extensive production at a very high level of skill. Though some native English craftsmen like Thomas Reve (fl.1520s)21 and Richard Bond (fl.1513–26)22 operated in and around London during these years, the Crown often preferred foreign craftsmen who could bring with them the newer styles and techniques, along with the cachet of experience in the Renaissance courts in which most had served. In addition, these French, Flemish, and Dutch artisans had better access to the glass produced in, for 18 Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, p. 48; Wilfred James Drake (ed.), A Dictionary of Glasspainters and ‘Glasyers’ of the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1955), p. 142; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 39; Netherlands Institute for Art History, RKD database, https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/, vide Van Ort. 19 Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 38–9, 190. 20 Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 48–50. 21 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1786, repr., 1871), pp. 490–2; Richard Marks, ‘Window Glass’, in Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (2012), pp. 192–3; Carola Hicks, The King’s Glass: A Story of Tudor Power and Secret Art (2007), p. 137. 22 Richard Marks, ‘Window Glass’, pp. 192–4, 196; Stephen Clare, ‘The Great Glass Vista: A Condition Survey of the Stained Glass in King’s College Chapel’, in King’s College Chapel, 1515–2015, ed. Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman (2015), p. 140.

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example, Normandy, Burgundy, or Lorraine, which was more varied in colour than the mostly clear or pale white glass available in England. In addition to the annealing of enamel pigments, foreign craftsmen also introduced new techniques for drawing cartoons and cutting glass, all of which made for more efficient and innovative production. Such techniques contrasted sharply with the time-honoured methods of their native English competitors who were, in this craft as in others, not notably prone to innovation on their own.23 As with stranger-painters in general, these newcomers may have been welcome at court, but not at all necessarily in the streets of London or in the halls of rival guilds. Anti-immigrant sentiment sent newcomers of all stripe, including glass painters, scurrying across the River Thames to Southwark, beyond at least some of the regulatory arms of city and livery company authorities.24 Yet the extensive collaboration required for large projects like the Chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, obliged foreigners like Barnard Flower (fl.c. 1496–1517) and Galyon Hone (fl.1517–51) to adopt a measure of integration by employing some native Englishmen as well. Men like, for example, Reve, Bond, and Simon Symonds (fl.1510s–30s) also found themselves part of those teams, and learned foreign techniques and styles in the process.25 Despite such collaborations, these conditions provoked a long-standing occupational rivalry, most vividly experienced in London. On the one hand stood the native English glaziers and glass painters as represented by the London Company of Glaziers and, to some extent, the Painter-Stainers. On the other stood the strangers, along with, at least some of the time, some native English co-workers who were members of other companies. Responding in 1522/3 to a Glaziers’ Company petition which cited eighteen ‘stranger’ glazier householders and at least forty or fifty apprentices and servants in Southwark, Parliament passed a statute limiting the number of apprentices permitted to strangers. The statute additionally brought Southwark under the powers of search which applied elsewhere within the city, and restricted the employment of strangers under certain conditions.26 In the end, the legislation proved a nuisance to the stranger glass painters, but not by any means an absolute disaster. In fact, the final paragraph of that same statute actually encouraged the high-end patronage of strangers in the glazing and some other trades by exempting patrons with lands and goods worth £100 a year from any restrictions on employing them. In effect, that allowed affluent patrons to continue to employ the more highly skilled craftsmen, who 23 Curd,

Flemish and Dutch Artists, p. 50. Stained Glass in England, pp. 41, 207–8; D. R. Ransome, ‘The Struggles of the Glaziers’ Company with the Foreign Glaziers’, Guildhall Miscellany, 2:1 (September, 1960), 12–20. Though the Painter-Stainers’ jurisdiction extended to four miles around London, the Glaziers’ Company did not. 25 Clare, ‘The Great Glass Vista’, pp. 137–41; Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 51–7. 26 14/15 Henry VIII, c. 2; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 41; Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 60–2. 24 Marks,

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tended to be strangers, to the detriment of the small jobber, who tended to be native English. Then too, when the statute undermined the unrestricted liberties of Southwark, people like Gaylon Hone moved to the Liberty of St Thomas’s Hospital, which was still exempt from such controls. Secure in that protected space, Hone proceeded to expand his workshop by leaps and bounds as commissions rolled in from affluent clients. And when Thomas Cromwell began to investigate and then to dissolve establishments like St Thomas’s, Hone and the Fleming James Nicholson (fl.c.1518–post-1544), amongst others, applied for patents of denization as further protection from prosecution.27 Even then, the strangers did not always succeed in evading the long arm of the Glazier’s Company or the courts. In 1538 the Company managed to apprehend Hone, Nicholson, and others working within its area of search and had them imprisoned until well-placed friends secured their release. In the end, the leading stranger-glaziers agreed to pay the Company a yearly fee for permission to continue their work, and went about their business thereafter.28 In sum, even as native English craftsmen began to pick up the techniques introduced by their stranger competitors, the foreigners’ superior skills allowed them to win most of the contracts for high-end figurative commissions while avoiding – albeit with no little difficulty – statutory interference in their work. In their wake, most of the native English glaziers and painters were left to carry out minor commissions, to repair old windows, and to perform the non-figurative aspects of the craft like the painting of arms. Notwithstanding resistance from native English craftsmen, the office of King’s Glazier, and with it the responsibility to hire others in the same craft, went in early Tudor times to the succession of the foreigners Barnard Flower and then Galyon Hone. Flower is recorded in England from at least 1496, when he worked alongside other foreign glaziers at Woodstock Palace and then, in 1497, at Shene. His royal office, taken up in March 1505, brought him the substantial sum of £24 paid twice yearly in addition to particular royal commissions and the use of a glazier’s lodge in the west end of Westminster Palace. Over the next twelve years he undertook various painting schemes at Richmond Palace, the chapel of Our Lady at Walsingham in Norfolk, the royal manor at Woking, the Savoy Chapel in The Strand, Cardinal Wolsey’s York Palace, and King’s College, Cambridge. His memory lingered through the years: writing in the 1760s, Horace Walpole knew him not only as a glazier, but also as an excellent painter.29 27

Hone moved into St Thomas’s in 1533; James Nicholson had done so around 1526. Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 12, 60–3. 28 Ransome, ‘The Struggle of the Glaziers’ Company’, 13–19; J.A. Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters in the Sixteenth Century’, Antiquaries Journal, 5:2 (1925), 148–57; Curd, Flemish and Dutch Artists, pp. 63–4. 29 Will of Barnard Flower, TNA, PROB 11/18/525; Arthur Oswald, ‘Barnard Flower, the King’s Glazier’, The Journal of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, 11 (1951–55), 8–21;

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Hone succeeded Flower as King’s Glazier from c.1517, and continued in the same vein.30 Amongst his many other commissions, he worked first with Nicholson,31 as well as the Englishmen Richard Bond32 and Thomas Reve,33 and then with the Fleming Francis Williamson (‘Willemzoen’, fl.1520s–30s)34 and his English associate Simon Symonds35 in painting and glazing the windows at King’s College Chapel between 1526 and 1530.36 Such major commissions called for a multitude of skills, including painting, gilding, lettering, and even plastering and carving. Whilst men like Flower and Hone will have had to be familiar with the full range of those skills, they will inevitably have relied on others to take on some of the work. Each project thus entailed the employment of several other craftsmen, paid at a daily rate, plus the main contractor himself, often paid at a pre-determined rate calculated by the piece or the dimensions of the glass. Some of these workers will have been native English craftsmen, but some will also, perhaps necessarily, have been strangers, born and trained abroad. Because the local communities of such craftsmen were small and, at least for the immigrants, geographically concentrated, the pool of potential employees remained limited. As a result, many were related in one way or another to those who hired or worked alongside them.37 Hone’s son Gerrard (fl.1540–65), Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters’, 148–9; Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 47, 49, 207; Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery of the Middle Ages (2012), pp. 165, 188, 193–4, 371–2, 396–9; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, p. 67; Clare, ‘The Great Glass Vista’, 137–41. 30 Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954), pp. 170–1; Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters’, 149; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, pp. 67, 490–2; Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 23, 49, 207–8, 234; Hicks, The King’s Glass, pp. 123–30, 136–42, 148, 192–5. 31 Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters’, 148–51; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 25; Hicks, The King’s Glass, pp. 136–7; Clare, ‘The Great Glass Vista’, pp. 86, 140. 32 Richard Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery, pp. 192–4, 196. 33 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, pp. 490–2; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 23; Hicks, The King’s Glass, p. 137. 34 Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters’, 148; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, p. 67; Hicks, The King’s Glass, pp. 137–8. 35 Knowles, ‘Disputes between English and Foreign Glass-Painters’, 149 and n. 2; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, pp. 67, 100; Hicks, The King’s Glass, pp. 137–8. 36 Marks, Studies in the Art and Imagery, p. 193; Clare, ‘The Great Glass Vista’, pp. 135–41; James Simpson, ‘Glassy Temporalities: The Chapel Windows of King’s College, Cambridge’, in King’s College Chapel, 1515–2015, ed. Jean Michel Massing and Nicolette Zeeman (2015), pp. 79–96. 37 For a pioneering statement of this point, see David Ransome, ‘Artisan Dynasties in London and Westminster in the Sixteenth Century’, Guildhall Miscellany, 6 (1964), 236–47, but it is reinforced in close detail throughout Edward Town’s ‘Biographical Dictionary’ of 2014.

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for example, took up his father’s craft, and married the daughter of the Cologne-born painter and fellow-immigrant glass-painter Harry Blankstone (fl.1506–41), whom the elder Hone had employed at Hampton Court.39 Over the next few decades these family alliances created an extended interchange amongst different traditions, and brought the latest continental techniques and fashions to England, and to English craftsmen. In this milieu, the strangers’ designs often remained paramount. When Williamson and Symonds were contracted to do the upper storey windows of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, in 1527, they were ordered to do so ‘according to the manner done by [the Fleming] Barnard Flower’.40 Williamson, a foreigner in any event, probably knew them well; Symonds, an Englishman, had much to learn from him. That magnificent Cambridge project reminds us that the heyday of English painted glass was far from an exclusive London or courtly phenomenon. Outside the court and the King’s Works, important regional glass-painting centres had long flourished. Some did so, along with ample ecclesiastical patronage, right up to the 1540s.41 Surprisingly few of the great monastic establishments prior to the Reformation either in London or elsewhere seem to have had their own resident glaziers. Most such men appear to have been lay craftsmen based in regional, especially urban, workshops. East Anglia and Yorkshire, for example, certainly had their share of extensive monastic establishments. Yet from what we can tell, their glass craftsmen were laymen gathered in provincial centres like Norwich and York, both of which easily proved London’s equal as centres of ‘stained’ glass production. Lacking much competition from their surrounding areas, the more enterprising glass painters in these central urban places often served wide regions. Accepting commissions here and there, they produced most of their work in their home workshops before installing it where required. Norwich glass painters had dined exceedingly long and well on the explosion of construction and ornamentation in East Anglian parish churches of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Their work may still be found in and around that region.42 Their York counterparts similarly dominated a large swathe of Northern England, running 38

38

Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 171. Foister, ‘Foreigners at Court: Holbein, Van Dyck, and the Painter-Stainers’ Company’, in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Court: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed. David Howarth (Cambridge, 1993), p. 38; Will of Harry Bankstone, of St Mary Magdalene, Southwark, 1541, TNA, PROB 11/28/629; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 155; Edward CroftMurray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1962), p. 156; L.F. Salzman, Building in England down to 1540: A Documentary History (Oxford, 1952; 1997), p. 165; Simon Thurley, The Royal Palaces of Tudor England: Architecture and Court Life, 1460–1547 (London and New Haven, 1993), p. 106; H.M. Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works (7 vols, 1963–82), IV, pp. 25, 133, 135. 40 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, p. 100. 41 For the abundance of such patronage in the immediate pre-Reformation decades, see Robert Whiting, The Reformation of the English Parish Church (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 137–41. 42 C. Woodforde, The Norwich School of Glass Painting in the Fifteenth Century (1993); King, 39 Susan

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from east to west, at the same time.43 Some lesser centres, places like Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich, Colchester, and even the small northwest Essex community of Thaxted, also had their glass painters, though such painters were of course fewer in number.44 The density of workshops in the larger centres permitted more convenient opportunities for collaboration on the larger projects and a greater range of skills and specialities from which a patron could choose. Some of the shops themselves were large enough to take up simultaneous commissions in different parts of their respective regions. The ensuing debacle of the Reformation, marked in regard to glass windows by the Injunctions of 1538 and 1547, caught a small but very talented cohort of glass painters in mid-career, toppling even people like Galyon Hone from their hard-won perch. After the brief respite of Mary’s reign the iconoclastic policy of the Crown continued with the Injunctions of 1559, at least one of which referred specifically to the idolatrous content of glass windows.45 Once a wealthy man, Hone’s fortunes plummeted steadily as his commissions disappeared. As Richard Marks has discovered, Hone’s goods ‘… were assessed in 1541 at £40 and he kept no fewer than five servants. By 1545 his goods were only worth 20 shillings and in 1549 and 1551 they were worth even less.’ His last recorded payment was for a mere 20s. in 1551 for work done at the parish church of St Mary, Rotherhithe. He died in very reduced circumstances shortly thereafter.46 The call for painted glass itself did not entirely disappear, but its popularity as a medium for religious motifs declined sharply. Few dedicated glass painters are recorded as working in the two generations between c.1540 and c.1600.47 Much of the remaining glaziers’ work consisted of replacing broken windows with new ones, whilst the call for such grand schemes as had only recently been completed at venues like King’s College, Cambridge, disappeared entirely. With them went any call for stranger glass painters, whose activity in England David, ‘Glass Painting’, in Medieval Norwich, ed. Carole Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson (London and New York, 2004), pp. 121–36. 43 Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 41; O’Connor, ‘John Petty, Glazier and Mayor of York’, pp. 34, 39. 44 Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 41, 198; Robert Willis and John Willis Clarke, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge and of the Colleges of Cambridge and Eton (4 vols, Cambridge, 1886), II, p. 568. 45 See especially Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, I, Laws Against Images, (Oxford, 1998), pp. 226–33, 254–8, 298–301; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 448–50. 46 Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 234. 47 Of the nearly 2,800 painters of all types listed as working in the British Isles between 1500 and 1640 in the September 2019, edition of the EMBP database, only eleven are listed primarily as glass painters between 1547 and 1600. Though this should not be taken as an indication of the number who actually painted on glass, it does suggest that few painters were known by that particular designation or employed it themselves. Tittler, EMBP.

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declined accordingly. There is no little irony in the observation that, when new glass appeared in parish churches after the late 1530s, it tended to be unpainted, or adorned at most with coats of arms that required somewhat less skill to produce.48 It would take another two generations before ecclesiastical patronage for large-scale figurative glass displays, or demand for the skills of the stranger glass painters who excelled in their production, would revive. In the meantime, glass painting survived mostly in the homes of gentry who were anxious to display the heraldic imagery of their own families as well as families with which they were tied either by marriage or friendship. We have already noted how John Kaye of Woodsome, Yorkshire, sought to display his social position by having a local painter run up a tableau of sixty-six ‘family and friends’ on a wood panel in the 1560s. More affluent families of that same era went about that goal by commissioning such displays on glass. Often appearing well away from the universities or the metropolitan centre, they have usually escaped the scholarly attention readily paid to those more familiar venues. Yet displays like that at Lyme Hall or Brereton Hall in Cheshire, the latter boasting some 330 shields painted on glass in the mid-Elizabethan years,49 appear to have been reasonably common, making the Elizabethan era something of a golden age for arms glass painting.50 Given the relatively remote location of those Cheshire estates, their patrons will surely have drawn on the painting community of Chester. As noted in Chapter 4, Chester painters dominated the visual culture of that city’s hinterland just as their Norwich counterparts dominated much of East Anglia and as York-based painters held sway over much of the northeast. Though the genres of glass painting and arms painting remained somewhat distinct, the gaps between them were not unbridgeable. Both will have drawn from the same visual vocabulary of designs which were in local or regional circulation. Both reflected the same emphasis on heraldic display which was so characteristic of the same locale. In addition, whilst London glaziers and painters each had their own guild, Chester’s painters and glaziers, to take one regional example, had closely intermingled since 1534 as brethren of the same guild. As the Hayward brothers of Norwich had done a few generations earlier, many of those trained in glass painting could readily paint on other surfaces as well. In the hard times to come, they will often have had to do so in order to survive, and the best masters trained their apprentices in a variety of skills. Chester boasted a great many painters for a city of its modest size and while a few, like John Souch, will have been able to specialize in a single genre, most will have had to be as versatile as possible in order to keep afloat. Even successful painters like Randle Holme the elder and his son Randle the younger developed 48 Whiting,

The Reformation of the English Parish Church, pp. 141, 145. Penny Hebgin-Barnes, ‘“Magnificent and Sumptuous”: The Glazing of Brereton Hall’, Vidimus, 103 (Oct., 2016), unpaginated. 50 Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640 (London and New Haven, 2009), pp. 286–7. 49

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a broad repertoire. Holme the elder served in some official heraldic capacity or other for much of his adult life and was obviously adept at arms painting. Yet he also painted furnishings like pews in his parish church of St Mary on the Hill and painted at least one portrait. His apprentices blossomed both as arms painters (for example, Jacob Chaloner and Randle the younger) and as portrait painters (like Souch),51 and any of them might have painted on glass as well. Though such versatility might have been even more advantageous in more rural areas where specialists were thinner on the ground, it could be found amongst painters in both provincial and metropolitan communities: small-town craftsmen like William Blithe of Thaxted,52 men in middling communities like John Bateman of King’s Lynn (known as a painter of glass windows, but, in 1631/2, also of pews),53 and the prominent, London-based stranger-painter Martin van Bentham (fl.1595–1619).54 Richard Marks may have been hasty in concluding that ‘glass painting [in these years] ceased to be a distinctive craft, and became a branch of painting’,55 as the Glaziers’ Company of London incorporated in 1638/9 included even such leading glass painters as Richard Butler and Baptist Sutton (fl.c.1620–d.1667).56 But for most of the century prior to that incorporation, the call for glass painting outside the heraldic idiom made it very heavy going indeed for those who did little else. Very few dedicated glass painters seem to have survived between the 1540s and the end of the century. When the fashion for painted glass beyond the heraldic idiom began to revive in the late Elizabethan years, it did so in both residential and ecclesiastical premises. The lead seems to have been taken by the more assertive approach of the Elizabethan younger generation – men like Robert Cecil – with their prodigy houses, their family chapels, and, in some cases, their more sophisticated tastes. Although this may simply be because their buildings are more 51

ODNB, vide Holme, Randle the elder; Tittler, EMBP, vide Holme, Randle. Known as a painter and glazier, Blithe collaborated with a partner in glazing and painting the windows at Trinity College, Cambridge, between 1562 and 1564 for £118. Though this was an enormous sum for the time, it will have had to cover substantial overhead costs. Willis and Willis Clarke, The Architectural History of the University of Cambridge, II, p. 568; Drake, Dictionary of Glasspainters and ‘Glasyers’, p. 18. 53 Churchwardens’ Accounts for St Margaret and St Nicholas, King’s Lynn, Norfolk Record Office microfilm 1799, unpaginated, see years 1631 and 1632. 54 R.E.G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk (eds), Return of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London (4 vols, Aberdeen, 1900–8), III, pp. 146, 160, 176–7; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 96; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 153; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 178. 55 Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 58; see also Whiting, The Reformation of the Parish Church, p. 142; Penny Hebgin-Barnes, ‘Defenders of the Realm at Poole Hall, Cheshire’, Vidimus, 44 (October, 2010), unpaginated ‘Feature’ essay; Hebgin-Barnes, ‘“Magnificent and Sumptuous”: The Glazing of Brereton Hall, Cheshire’, Vidimus, 103 (October, 2016), unpaginated ‘Feature’ essay. 56 Charter of the Glaziers’ Company of London, 6 November, 1637, LGL, MS. CLC/L/ GD/A/001/MS05759. 52

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likely to have survived for examination and description than those further down the social scale, it does seem to have reflected a shift in taste amongst that generational cohort.57 The emergence at about the same time of a more appreciative approach to sacramentary worship on the part of churchmen like Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrews worked to the same effect. Blossoming particularly under Archbishop William Laud, an emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ drove the return of religious themes even beyond the Old Testament, and brought them back to cathedrals and churches as well as chapels. By the mid-1610s glass painting was once again a well-established craft and remained so until the Cromwellian years to come.58 Ironically, this brief revival found an insufficient number of native English craftsmen left to answer the call. A number of the few remaining Elizabethan glass painters in and around London, men like Joseph Elstrack (d.1596),59 Joseph Helper (d.c. 1600?),60 Lancelot Young (d.1603),61 and William Miller (d.c. 1605),62 wound down their operations and then died out just at the outset of that revival. None, in any event, had been known for much in the way of figurative painting, concentrating instead on arms painting and other decorative work. Even when family chapels became common venues for worship in the early seventeenth century, most of the few remaining Londonbased glass painters continued to be employed in arms painting and other non-figurative work.63 There were occasional exceptions to this void of talent amongst native English craftsmen. When the Suffolk Chorographer Robert Reyce made his will in 1638, he left his ‘boxes of paint colours’ to a William Melles, whom he described as a ‘painter and glazier of Lavenham’. He expressed the desire that Melles ‘… shall from time to time renew and amend the decays of the colours, words, letters, compartments and forms of these tables, writings, and 57 An intriguing perspective on this ‘younger generation’ may be found in Anthony Esler, The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, N. Carolina, 1966). 58 In what is perhaps now the fullest discussion of the subject, Margaret Aston has usefully acknowledged the revisionist approach to Laud’s role in this, pointing out that other churchmen, some of them earlier, shared his concerns for that beautification. But she nevertheless affirms his role in promoting the renewal of religious imagery in church windows. Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 660–1 and, more generally, Chapter 7, pp. 617–706. 59 Elstrack was the father of the well-known engraver Reynald Elstrack. Geoffrey Lane, ‘“A World Turned Upside Down”, London Glass-Painters, 1600–1660’, Journal of Stained Glass, 29 (2005), 46. 60 Helper was identified as a glass painter in the baptismal record of his son Richard at Southwark St Saviour’s, 20 Nov., 1600, but fails to appear in records thereafter. LMA, MS P92/SAV/3001 20 November, 1600. I am grateful to Professor Alan H. Nelson for this reference. 61 Lane, ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, 46. 62 Ibid., 46. 63 Ibid. , 47.

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inscriptions which he has at any time made for me…in the parish church or chancel of Preston’ in Suffolk.64 The bequest affirms that, though he worked in a smallish town and is otherwise unknown to posterity, Melles’s talents extended to painting, glazing, and lettering on a variety of surfaces. It sounds as though he maintained a long-term relationship with the parish church through Reyce, who may have held the advowson or at least been a benevolent parishioner. In choosing Melles to keep up the painting, Reyce expressed his confidence in that painter’s multitude of skills, but there is nothing to suggest that those skills were sufficient to create the full-blown ‘beauty of holiness’ in Preston St Mary’s. By the late 1610s some few of the more skilled and versatile native English painters did emerge to answer that call. One of them appears to have been Richard Greenbury, whom we have met before.65 There has been some confusion as to whether there were two men of the same name, or one Richard Greenbury and one Robert Greenbury in the same era.66 Yet the identity of the Richard Greenbury who apprenticed with the well-established portrait painter Rowland Lockey from 1598, became free of the Goldsmith’s Company in 1607, and paid quarterage fees to the Painter-Stainers in order to take on painting commissions within their London purview thereafter, seems secure. In 1631, possibly through the influence of his influential friend Sir Thomas Mayerne, he gained the post of Queen’s Painter. The bulk of Greenbury’s work, often overlooked in modern scholarship, consisted of portraiture. As noted in a previous chapter, he was one of a group of portrait painters who opposed the intrusion, as he saw it, of non-free ‘picturemakers’ into that metier,67 and he himself remained well-regarded and widely employed. Over the course of a long career, Greenbury produced paintings of Oxford figures like Bishop William Waynfleet, founder of Magdalene College; James I in 1623 (for which he received the substantial sum of £30); Robert Shirley, envoy of the Shah of Persia (1626); Arthur Lake, bishop of Bath and Wells (1626); and Lancelot Andrews. He produced portraits for the Vintners’ Company, and extensive decorative painting as part of the renovations on 64 Nesta Evans (ed.), Wills of the Archdeanery of Sudbury, 1636–1638 (Suffolk Record Society, 35, 1993), p. 223. 65 See above, p. 80. 66 The confusion is not in any way dissipated by the tendency of archival entries to omit a forename when referring simply to ‘Greenbury’. Edward Croft-Murray, The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Edward Town, and others all consider there to have been one Richard Greenbury, sometimes acknowledging that some documents refer to him as Robert Greenbury. Alex Koller, in contrast, argues for a Richard the glass-painter, a Robert Greenbury who painted panel portraits, and an Edward Greenbury, albeit saying little about this third putative member of the family. ODNB, vide Greenbury, Richard; Edward CroftMurray, Decorative Painting in England (2 vols, 1962) I, p. 204; Town, Biographical Dictionary, pp. 95–7; Koller, ‘ “One of the Greatest Compositions I ever saw”: Richard Greenbury’s Windows for the Chapel of Magdalen College, Oxford’, Journal of Stained Glass, 22 (1998), 3–4. 67 See above, pp. 83–4.

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Vintners’ Hall in the 1622/3, and a ‘history painting’ of The Massacre of Amboyna for the East India Company (1625).68 But along with all that, a Richard Greenbury, who appears to have been the same person, was sufficiently versatile to take on lucrative commissions for painting on glass. This he did, collaborating with glaziers like Thomas Haypole (fl.c. 1613 ff.) 69 at Lincoln’s Inn, the Queen’s Chapel of St James’ Palace in 1626, and Magdalen College Chapel, Oxford, 1637–40, painting in the latter a remarkable Last Judgement and an arresting series of saints.70 This work breaks sharply with existing conventions by introducing a ‘black-on-white’ technique of monochromatic painting which was altogether new on the English scene.71 Aside from Greenbury, Richard Butler and Baptist Sutton were the most prominent native English glass painters active under the early Stuarts. Both set up shop in Holborn, where their presence, along with other prominent painters of the day, brought them into closer proximity to the clientele of the Inns of Court and the expanding West End, marking a distinct shift from the traditional haunts of Southwark. Butler’s origins and training remain obscure, though his later work in arms painting and repairing glass suggests it will have included some traditional glazing and glass-painting skills. Though he must have been sufficiently well known by that time to have secured such a plum commission, his career comes into view in 1609 when Robert Cecil employed him to carry out large figurative works at both his Hatfield Chapel and the New Exchange. He is usually credited with the glass images at Hatfield of Moses and the Bulrushes, David and Goliath, and Elijah in the Fiery Chariot, and (with more certainty) the Jonah window.72 He received £38 in 1611/12 for painted glass at Salisbury House in the Strand, and for mending Cecil’s arms in the New Exchange. In 1621/2 he received £9 10s. for replacing broken windows at Whitehall Palace, and enjoyed a major commission from Sir Henry Slingsby at More Monkton, near York, and then 68

ODNB, vide Greenbury, Richard; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, p. 221; Christopher Wright, Catherine Gordon, and Mary Peskett Smith (eds), British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections (New Haven and London (2006), p. 378; John Ingamells, The English Episcopal Portrait: A Catalogue (1981), p. 260; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 95–7; National Portrait Gallery, ‘British Picture Restorers, 1600–1950’, www.npg.org. uk/research.programmes/directory-of-picture-restorers.php.’ (2nd edn, March, 2016), vide Greenbury. 69 Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation, pp. 645–7. 70 Lane, ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, 50–1, 55, 58. On the Magdalen College Chapel, Greenbury worked with a mason who rearranged the tracery to fit his design. Greenbury charged 4s. 6d. for every foot of glass, receiving payments over the course of the work of £40, £117 12s., and £112 14s 6d.; Koller, ‘One of the Greatest Compositions’, 1–15. 71 Kollar, ‘One of the Greatest Compositions’, 6–7. 72 Annabel Ricketts, Claire Gapper, and Caroline Knight, ‘Designing for Protestant Worship: The Private Chapels of the Cecil Family’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 115–36, especially pp. 131–2.

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a commission for work at the new chapel of Lincoln’s Inn. The latter was consecrated in 1623 and completed over the next several years. In the following year Lord William Howard paid him small sums for minor work at Naworth Castle in Cumberland. Further work at Lincoln’s Inn consisted of armorial bearings in the 1630s, while the Inner Temple employed him regularly for arms painting between 1626 and 1638. A series of lucrative commissions from Archbishop Laud at Lambeth followed in 1635 and 1636, and John Young, dean of Winchester, commissioned him to repair glass at Winchester Cathedral in 1637.73 Like Butler, Sutton remained London-based and did much of his work there. That included the Jacob Window, St Leonard’s Shoreditch (1634); the King’s arms at St Mary Colechurch (for £28 in 1640/41); a glass portrait of Queen Elizabeth in the vestry of St Dunstan-in-the-West (1645); the Commonwealth arms at All Hallows Barking (1654), and possibly the east window of the New Chapel, St Margaret’s, Westminster. He was also commissioned to remove the stained glass in the London Guildhall, 1642/3. But he accepted commissions outside the metropolis as well, in places like Guildford (at St Abbot’s Hospital and the parish church of Holy Trinity); St Leonard, Apethorpe, Northamptonshire (1621); and Little Easton, Essex (1621).74 When even efforts by men like Greenbury, Butler, and Sutton proved insufficient to satisfy the revived interest in figurative (as opposed to armorial) glass painting in these years, English patrons once again solicited the skills of strangers to do their bidding. Along with their well-honed technical skills, these stranger-painters brought with them a greater familiarity with that classical and New Testament imagery which, once targeted by Tudor iconoclasts, had been brought back into fashion by the more religiously traditional, sophisticated, and affluent patrons of the early Stuart era.75 The most prominent of the strangers was the Frenchman Louis Dauphin (fl.1610–22), whose name was quickly anglicized to Dolphin, and the Van 73

LMA, MS. ACC/1876/F/09/048; Lane, ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, 53–8; Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558–1625 (New Haven, 1997), pp. 121, 218; Michael Archer, ‘English Painted Glass in the Seventeenth Century: The Work of Abraham van Linge’, Apollo (January, 1975), 26–31; Inner Temple MS FIN/1/1, Accounts, fol. 206v; F.A. Inderwick (ed.), A Calendar of the Inner Temple Records, II, 1603–1660 (1898), pp. 158, 171, 180, 186, 202, 209, 218; Kathryn A. Morrison (ed.), Apethorpe: The Story of an English Country House (London and New Haven, 2016), p. 105; Michael Archer, ‘Richard Butler, Glass-Painter’, Burlington Magazine, 130:1046 (May, 1990), 308–15. 74 Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, 2003), p. 152, n.58; Lane, ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, 52–3, 57–8; Morrison, Apethorpe, p. 105; Michael Archer, ‘17th Century Painted Glass at Sutton’, Essex Journal (Spring, 1977), 9; Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation, pp. 612, 649, 692, 967; LMA, P69/AND2/A/010/ MS06673/002, see by dates. 75 Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation England (London and New Haven, 2011), p. 11; Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture, p. 220.

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Lingen or Van Linge kinsmen, Abraham (fl. in England 1620 or 1623–42) and Bernard (fl.1620–28). Dauphin painted glass for the chapel at Robert Cecil’s Hatfield House in 1609, and then is most likely to have done the windows at Francis Bacon’s Verulam House on the grounds of Gorhambury in Hertfordshire before returning to work at Hatfield in 1610 and possibly 1616 and 1622. He also worked with (or perhaps succeeded) the native English glass painter Robert Rudland of Oxford in work at Wadham College, c. 1614–16.76 Of the Van Lingens (who may or may not have been brothers), Abraham, who came to England around 1620 or 1623, is considered the more accomplished. He drew most of his patronage from Oxford colleges: Lincoln (1629–31), Christ Church (1630s), Queen’s (1635–7), Balliol (1637), and University (1641), but he also painted The Deposition from the Cross (1629) at Hampton Court Castle, Hereford (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London), glass at Lincoln’s Inn Chapel, and in private estates including that of Sir John St John at Lydiard Tregoze in Wiltshire and of Hanameel Chibborne at Messing Hall, Essex.77 Bernard van Lingen had worked in Paris until religious conflict drove him to London in 1621. Aside from a commission at Lincoln’s Inn (1623–4), his English work also derived mostly from Oxford: Christ’s Passion in glass at Wadham College, and other religious scenes at, for example, both Lincoln (1629–30) and Christ Church (1630–1) Colleges.78 As an unusual sign of the times, Bernard and possibly Abraham as well seem to have acquired an English agent. Thomas Langton (1570–1642), a London glass dealer, Merchant Adventurer, and churchwarden of St Stephen Walpole, had become influential in glass-painting and glaziers’ circles. The Van Lingens – who may not have been comfortable negotiating in English– came to rely on him to make arrangements with English clients. Langton drove a hard bargain in securing Bernard work at Wadham College, threatening to set van Lingen to work at St Paul’s instead if Wadham’s warden didn’t commission him first. Geoffrey Lane has noted that when Van Lingen first came to London, London glass painters tried to mislead him about the payments received for their work, so that he would raise the rates for all. Langton knew better. He seems to have played a key role in determining Van Lingen’s employment and, presumably, his

76 Wells-Cole,

Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, p. 218; Paul M. Hunneyball, Architecture and Image-Building in Seventeenth-Century Hertfordshire (Oxford, 2004), p. 92; Archer, ‘Richard Butler, Glass Painter’, 309; Archer, ‘English Painted Glass in the Seventeenth Century’, 26–31; Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation, p. 649. 77 ODNB, vide Linge, Bernard; Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, p. 218; Marks, Stained Glass in England, pp. 235–6; Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation, pp. 652–3, 658–9, 675. 78 ODNB, vide Linge, Bernard; Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration, p. 218; Marks, Stained Glass in England, p. 235; Aston, Broken Idols of the Reformation, p. 648 and n. 115; H.T. Kirby, ‘The van Linge Window at Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire’, Journal of the British Society of Master GlassPainters, 14:2 (1965), 117–21.

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remuneration.79 Langton was active elsewhere in Oxford, also serving as a go-between in securing Magdalen College’s contract with Richard Greenbury for the windows at the College Chapel which were completed between 1637 and 1640.80 Agents like Langton were not at all common at that time. He seems to have fallen into the role through his business as a merchant who imported continental glass into England, and through his capacity as churchwarden at St Leonard’s. His experience in contracting Abraham to do St Leonard’s windows will have gained him some notoriety as an agent, and that skill filled an apparent void. Save for those who were religious refugees, the stranger-painters’ usual route into English employment will have been via direct contact with individual laymen, especially those of gentle or aristocratic status, who will have set them to work in their houses and chapels. But officials of Oxford colleges or provincial parish churches were less likely to have easy or direct contact with such highly skilled artisans, almost all of whom were London-based. Someone like Langton offered a valuable service in making such connections. In large measure, these few eminent glass painters come to our attention because of the quality and characteristics of their work, and because they carried out that work for stable and enduring institutional patrons who recorded their names in records of payment. Not all institutions or individual patrons took such care, and many records kept by those who did so have not survived. In consequence, our sense of the importance of men like Butler and Sutton, Dauphin and the Van Lingens, must be balanced by the probability that others still unknown to us will also have played substantial parts in this brief revival of glass painting. A great deal of such work may have been carried out at the same time outside London and the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. It is sobering to consider that the amalgamated Company of Plumbers, Glaziers, Pewterers, and Painters of Newcastle included no fewer than eighty-four members between 1560 and 1645, and – though it has proven impossible to tell which of them followed which of those nominal occupations – a substantial number must have been glass painters or general painters.81 In any event the Cromwellian campaigns against religious imagery in churches and chapels made the early Stuart revival of figurative painting on glass a short-lived affair. By the mid-1640s, the game had changed once more. Most devotional imagery literally went out of the window, and the fashion for glass painting reverted once more to the preoccupation with the heraldic and the secular.

79

Lane, ‘A World Turned Upside Down’, 49–51. Koller, ‘One of the Greatest Compositions’, 2 and n.11. 81 Tyne and Wear Archives Service, Company Books of the Company of Plumbers, Glaziers, Pewterers, and Painters of Newcastle, MS GP 2/2, microfilm 1273, nos 7–8. 80

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7 The Workshop Personnel There are many ways to think about a workshop. The term may refer to group of people, what the French refer to as une équipe, conjointly engaged in a common activity. When that activity consists of some form of production, it may also refer to the defined physical space which houses it. Such a space may be connected to a place of residence, making some workshops co-terminus both spatially and socially with households, with some or all members of one also belonging to the other. On the other hand, a workshop may remain a distinct physical structure, disconnected from any residential premises. It may even extend to more than one such physical structure. Not all of these meanings were mutually exclusive, but all of them would apply at one time or another to most pre-industrial artisanal occupations, including painting. A discussion of the workshop as a physical construct follows in the next chapter; this one investigates its social organization. As we have seen, the members of the typical painter’s workshop will have consisted at its most rudimentary level of the master working alone, perhaps assisted by his wife or an occasional casual worker or journeyman. Many established painters will have been assisted by an apprentice or sometimes two, while the largest workshops, as maintained by such painter-contractors as, for example, Rowland Buckett, will have employed additional journeymen on either long- or short-term contracts. Painters contracted for commissions away from their base might bring workers with them or, in the case of major commissions on such extensive building projects as Knole or Hatfield, might contract local men for the less skilled aspects of the job. These ranks in the workshop’s employment ladder need to be considered one by one. Aside from the casual labourer who might be employed short-term for menial tasks, the lowest position in the painter’s workshop belonged to the apprentice. Apprenticeships began with the signature of a parent or guardian on an indenture, binding the offspring to serve for a stated duration in return for both training in the craft and keep in the master’s household. At least in theory, apprenticeship served as the first rung on both the occupational ladder leading to the status of master painter and as the equivalent rung on a ladder of civil status leading to the freemanry, and thus to the full economic and (in most cases) political rights within the community. But the climb was arduous to say the least, and many failed to complete it.

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Once an apprentice signed on, he or she was in for the long haul. The Statute of Artificers of 1563 (5 Eliz. I, c. 4) required an apprentice to serve a minimum of seven years but failed to state a maximum. The standard for the painters’ trade, amongst others, often extended to ten or even more.1 Even seven years seemed like a long time to many who were bound by such a contract. That length may help explain why so many apprenticeships failed: sixty per cent in London, and seventy-five or even eighty-five elsewhere!2 The City of London even developed a process for the formal dissolution of apprenticeships which avoided some of its potentially disastrous effects.3 Apprenticeship no doubt had its attractions. It came with room, board, and training. It provided the qualifications required to set up on one’s own after completion. At least in the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, it promised the apprentice a year’s work, at a fair wage, in the former master’s shop after completion.4 In practice, it sometimes led to apprentices inheriting their master’s equipment, paints, pattern books, or other resources.5 And some of the more benevolent masters appear to have helped direct potential clients towards a recently apprenticed acolyte, just as Randle Holme the elder did very successfully, helping the young John Souch of Chester establish his portrait clientele amongst the region’s armigerous families.6 But the conditions in which apprentices lived and worked were often very difficult: arbitrary, exploitative, highly restrictive, and materially severe. The temptation to break contract after a rudimentary training and then to flee beyond the reach of local authorities must have been very strong. Many an itinerant painter must have been a 1 The Mercers and the Grocers were amongst other companies with ten-year apprenticeships, and had had them since well back into the fifteenth century: Anne F. Sutton, ‘The Shop-Floor of the London Mercery Trade: The Marginalization of the Artisan, the Itinerant Mercer and the Shopholder’, Nottingham Medieval Studies, 45 (2001), 38. Edward Roberts apprenticed for thirteen years (1602–15) with the Daventry painter George Smallbone; Northamptonshire Record Office, Daventry Borough Records, MS ML D3382, fol. 114v. 2 Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth Century London (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 311–15; Ilana Kraus Ben-Amos, ‘Failure to Become Freemen: Urban Apprentices in Early Modern England’, Social History, 16:2 (May, 1991), 41–65, and Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (London and New Haven, 1994), pp. 130–1; Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 330–5, and especially p. 330 and n.172; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (London and New Haven, 2000), p. 59; Cheshire and Chester Record Office (hereafter CCRO) MSS ZG 17/1 and ZG 17/2, passim. 3 Patrick Wallis, ‘Labour, Law, and Training in Early Modern London: Apprenticeship and the City’s Institutions’, Journal of British Studies, 51:4 (October, 2012), 791–819. 4 Ordinances of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of 1582 as published in City of London, Livery Company Commission, Report and Appendices, III (1884), p. 618. 5 Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), p. 97; Westminster City Archives, MS ACC 120/Elsam Register, fol. 268v. I am grateful to Dr Edward Town for the latter reference. 6 Robert Tittler, ‘Early Stuart Chester as a Centre for Regional Portraiture’, Urban History, 41:1 (Feb., 2014), 14–15.

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failed apprentice with a modicum of formal training. Other failed apprentices will have become semi-skilled labourers, picking up whatever work they could find and often entering into a life of poverty and vagrancy. Then, too, some apprenticeships broke down through a master’s transgressions, incapacity, or death. In areas under guild jurisdiction, it then became incumbent on that fellowship to mediate a dispute or reassign an apprentice to another master. The Painter-Stainers’ Company of London undertook both courses of action when required,7 though it will have been a brave and desperate apprentice to complain publicly about his master. A great many smaller masters never formally took on apprentices. They will have spared themselves the burdens of instruction, the sharing of workspace, and the responsibility for another mouth to feed. Yet amongst the more successful members of the trade, apprentices could bring welcome hands to the shop. Those benefits accrued in direct proportion to the stage of training. In the early stages the master expended more resources, in time, instruction, and expense, than he received in benefits from the apprentice’s work. But at some point in the mentorial relationship, the apprentice’s contribution exceeded the master’s investment, allowing the latter to recoup his expenditure and employ another skilled hand in the workshop at relatively low cost. The by-laws of the London Company of Painter-Stainers limited a master to a maximum of two apprentices at a time, and this seems to have been the standard elsewhere.8 Amongst its other aims, this limit was intended to control the supply of labour, and thus potential competition, within the occupation. Yet the periodic repetition of this restriction recorded in that Company’s Court Minute Book suggests frequent breaches of the rule.9 By 1634, and probably well before that time, it was tacitly acknowledged that numerous masters kept more than the statutory two. In that year the Company ordered a survey of the practice so that transgressors could be identified and fined.10 It appears by then that some other Company ordinances regarding apprentices had broken down as well. The traditional obligation to submit a sample of work for approval before being admitted to the freedom had also long fallen into abeyance. The Company came to recognize that a lot of shoddy work was being produced to the detriment of the whole.11 One may well see this concern for the management of the apprenticeship system as part of the Company’s response to encroachments on its authority. Overall, however, the institution of 7 LGL, Painter-Stainers’ Court Minute Book, 1623–1649, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/ MS05667/001, pp. 4, 5, 19, 21, 49, 55. 8 Amongst the exceptions who were allowed three apprentices were freemen of Norwich, and those who had served as masters of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London. Percy Millican (ed.), The Register of the Freemen of Norwich, 1548–1713 (Norwich, 1934), p. xix; Ordinances of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, III, p. 618. 9 Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book, passim. 10 Ibid., p. 91. 11 Ibid., p. 91.

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apprenticeship was much better and more formally managed in England than in most continental countries, and (along with other artisans) the painters benefitted from that management. Failed apprentices never made it to the journeymen’s ranks, a status which required the formal training which apprenticeship will have provided. On the completion of an apprenticeship, journeymen conventionally moved out of their former master’s household, obtained some of their own tools and equipment, and became free to seek work on their own. Some few were able to set up on their own as masters, finding work either directly from a patron or by sub-contracting to another master painter. In the former case, and depending on the local jurisdiction, they may have had to pay an annual fee to local authorities for the privilege of taking on their own work.12 But most journeymen gained their first employment by hiring on for a stated duration and wage in an established master’s workshop. Some such contracts ran for a year or two at a time, often (as we’ll see below) to help a widow run a workshop until her son could take it over or, in the early years of such a succession, to help a young master establish his business. But the well-established master painter had a steady need of the journeyman’s help, and a busy shop might often include one or more as wage labourers. Other arrangements were for much shorter terms and specific to a particular commission. We get a glimpse of such an arrangement in the experience of Adrian Pole (or Poole) who worked for five weeks in the early 1540s for the master painter John Wright of Leicester. Under Wright’s direction, Pole ground colours and produced ‘anticke work’ for the duke of Suffolk’s new gallery at Belvoir Castle. He received the relatively poor wage of 5d. per day for his work plus board for the duration of that project.13 He will have had to find his own lodging and does not seem to have worked for Wright on any more permanent a basis. Amongst the well-recorded painters of Chester, Randle Holme the elder employed ten journeymen over a career stretching from 1598 to 1655. John Wright (fl.1626–post-1650 and no relation to his Leicester namesake) and the Widow Anne Dewsbury (d.c. 1616) employed four each over shorter spans. Eighteen of the other sixty-four masters of Chester’s Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers – albeit not all of whom were painters – operating between 1560 and 1640 employed between one and three.14 Nearly

12

Donald Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 64–7. In Chester this fee would have been 12d.; in Canterbury, somewhat less. Tittler, EMBP: vide Sutton (1585) for Chester; Anderson, Thomas Bettes, Borley, Catmer, Colfe, Fox, Power, Redhead, Reede, and Scarborowe for Canterbury. 13 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, IV (1905), pp. 317, 341. 14 See Table 3, Chester Journeymen.

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all these Chester journeymen were hired for a year at a time, with few re-hired by the same masters.15 Many painters hovered along the boundaries between journeyman and small master by combining employment for others with whatever wage labour they could find. Daniel Holman (fl.1570s–1628) of St Giles Cripplegate may have worked from time to time for the prominent London Painter-Stainer Arthur Cutler. Yet he also worked, mostly painting ships, either as a journeyman or master of his own small shop, under the direction of Jan de Critz the elder over the course of at least sixteen years.16 The painting of ships in particular provided long-term contracts for numerous journeymen as well as small-time masters. Leading painters and licensees like de Critz, Richard Isaacson the elder (d.1621) and younger (1594–1659), or Thomas Rocke of Rochester (c.1555–post-1620, ‘Painter of the King’s Ships in the Medway’ under James I),17 will have employed such men for years at a time. A Court of Admiralty case of 1639 involving the younger Isaacson’s painting of the royal ships elicited the testimony of several of his workers. They described themselves as his ‘underworkers’, and appear to have worked for him over many years.18 In addition to apprentices, journeymen, and the master himself, a workshop sometimes included others. Established continental painters often enjoyed the assistance of ‘secondary painters’: those who had successfully apprenticed and may even have become independent masters on their own, but were still willing to work under, or alongside, the master of the shop. It was in this manner that, for example, Michelangelo emerged from the workshop of Ghirlandaio and that Lucas de Heere, amongst others, emerged from that of Frans Floris. The practice came naturally to stranger-painters working in England, allowing even those like Holbein to preside over the multitude of skills for which the master and his shop became known. Something very much like this will have pertained to the organizational model of the King’s Works, in which teams of painters and associated artisans worked under the direction of that official first known as the King’s Painter and then, from 1527, as the Sergeant Painter. The Office of the Revels employed painters in much the same manner. The involvement of so many foreign painters in 15

CCRO, MS ZG 17/1 and 17/2, passim. Scouloudi (ed.), Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639 (Huguenot Society of London, quarto series, 52, 1985), p. 241; LMA, MS P69/GIS/A/002/ MS06419/001 and /002 (unpaginated; see by date); Edward Town, ‘”Whilst he had his Perfect Sight” – New Information on John de Critz the Elder’, Burlington Magazine, 154 (July, 2012), 486; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 111. 17 Tittler, EMBP, vide Isaackson, De Critz, Rocke. 18 Testimony of the ‘underworkers’ William Ratcliffe, Walter Fortune, and Robert Mighall, TNA, HCA 13/55/205r–v. The reference is to the younger Richard Isaacson (1594–1659), nephew of Richard the elder and son of Paul (1565–1665), all of whom held contracts for painting the royal ships at one time or another. Tittler, EMBP, vide Isaacson.

16 Irene

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those projects will have made collaborative organization a familiar format for them, and one with a flexibility best suited to serve the Crown’s requirements. Similarly collaborative practices might also ensue in individual workshops. Even prior to c. 1500 some urban-based native English master painters employed a team of craftsmen with distinct but overlapping skills. We have already noted how William Heyward’s shop operated in Norwich between 1485 and 1506, in which Heyward, nominally a glazier, undertook panel and glass painting as well as glazing, and plied his trade over a wide area of East Anglia. His was a large, multi-media workshop, and one whose output readily blurred the lines between one craft and another. At least in Heyward’s case the model must have worked well. It generated an income which also allowed him to extend his activities further into the wider economy by investing in the local property market, which he did right up until his death in 1506.19 Such collaborative workshops could well provide a young journeyman further training beyond the formal bounds of apprenticeship. We know, for example, that John Bettes the elder, one of a family of Kentish-based painters, worked in Holbein’s studio and learned a lot from him, though he seems not to have been formally apprenticed. Bettes went on to enjoy a successful career of his own in which, judging by the quality of his surviving work, he will have applied the lessons of Holbein’s workshop to serve his own clientele.20 A long generation later Nicholas Hilliard never formally took on the young Isaac Oliver as his apprentice, but (no doubt drawing on a practice to which his lengthy continental sojourns introduced him) he tutored Oliver, reckoned to have been a frequent presence in Hilliard’s shop, nonetheless.21 From time to time Robert Peake’s workshop also appears to have included sundry other painters. Some of them, like Jan de Critz and Paul Isaacson, were collaborators of equal ability. Others of lesser status will have been assigned to specific roles in the completion of particular works.22 19

David King, ‘A Multi-Media Workshop in Late Medieval Norwich: A New Look at William Heyward’, in Lumières, formes et couleurs: Mélanges en hommage à Yvette Vanden Bemden, ed. Claire de Ruyt, Isabelle LeCocq, Michel Lefftz, and Mathieu Piavayx (Namur, 2008), pp. 193–204. The unspecialized nature of provincial workshops of this era is confirmed in Lucy Wrapson, ‘A Medieval Context for the Artistic Production of Painted Surfaces in England: Evidence from East Anglia, c.1400–1540’, in Painting in Britain 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage, ed. Tarnya Cooper, Aviva Burnstock, Maurice Howard, and Edward Town (2015), p. 200. 20 Jane Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art (34 vols, 1996), vide Bettes, John; ODNB, vide Bettes, John; Mary Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”: New Light on the Lives of Miniaturists and Large-scale Portrait Painters Working in London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Walpole Society, 47 (1978–80), 67; Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (1969), pp. 65–8; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 35. 21 Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist’s (London and New Haven, 2019), pp. 169–70. 22 Catharine MacLeod, ‘Robert Peake: Portraits, Patrons and Technical Evidence’, in Painting in Britain, ed. Cooper et al., especially pp. 288–9.

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Not infrequently, the master and secondary painter in such an arrangement were both strangers (i.e., foreigners) and they could well be linked by training, employment, and marriage with other such families (as were the de Critizes, Gheeraertses, and Olivers).23 As statutory restrictions technically forbad stranger-painters from taking on any but English apprentices and journeymen,24 an informal arrangement with a secondary painter offered a logical and mutually beneficial alternative. Such arrangements allowed the busy, high-end master another expert hand in the shop, one who could immediately pitch in without the supervision required by a journeyman or apprentice. This was the era, after all, in which the well-heeled and sophisticated portrait sitter had come to require more than a generic representation such as might be produced by someone who also did, for example, arms or decorative painting. By the latter decades of the era at hand, he or she now came to demand more than ever before the more refined artistry especially of the stranger-painters who had come, as noted above, in great numbers to England’s shores. These expectations might have led a hard-pressed master to delegate to others in his shop the details of costume, background, hair, or jewellery while he did the face and outlined the rest. In a 1635 survey taken of strangers resident in London, Van Dyck was listed as living in Blackfriars along with six ‘servants’, whom we may assume were apprentices or journeymen.25 That arrangement might also allow the stranger-painter, whose non-freeman’s status prevented him from taking on his own work, thereby to avoid prosecution for painting without licence. The Antwerp native Jan van Belcamp (1610–53) was targeted by the Company in 1627 as an unlicensed painter. But while he worked in the London area, subsequent employment by both Cornelius Johnson and Anthony van Dyck offered him security from the Painter-Stainers’ search.26 Sharing with those eminent painters a continental training and, indeed, a common mother tongue, someone like Van Belcamp would have been a comfortable fit and welcome presence in their workshops.27 Others like him found a similar niche. The Utrecht-born landscape painter Cornelius van Poehlenburg worked in England painting landscapes for the 23

See entries for all three families in Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’. 32 Henry VIII, c. 16. 25 Great Britain, Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I, VIII, 1635 (1865), p. 592. 26 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England (1786, repr. 1871), pp. 184–5; Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers, p. 246; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 93; Stefanie Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst im London des 17. Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim; Zurich; New York, 2000), pp. 151–2; Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book, p. 28. 27 Van Belcamp and Van Dyck were Antwerp-born and, though Johnson was born and baptized in London, his parents came from Antwerp and were members of the Dutch Church at Austin Friars where they had Cornelius baptized. They will most likely have spoken Dutch at home. Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary, p. 93; Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, pp. 151–2; Karen Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain (2009), p. 154. 24

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master painter Hendrick Steenwyck and may have done so for Rubens.28 The Genevan Jean Petitot, an enameller and jeweller as well as a painter, worked in London producing miniature copies of Van Dyck’s portraits under that master’s eye, thereby earning the latter’s recommendation to Charles I for his skills.29 The Dutchman Claude de Jonge (c.1590s–1663) came to England around 1628 and specialized in painting landscapes with bridges, which he may have done for others as well as on his own. His series on bridges gave him his niche and gained him a claim to at least minor fame in his time.30 The very volume of production itself, in studios run by the likes of Holbein, Mytens, Rubens, or Van Dyck, almost certainly came to require and employ such specialists.31 Any discussion of the painter’s workshop must consider the women in the room. The role of women in the pre-industrial English economy has been an important subject for investigation for some time now, but most studies have dealt with a later period, with trade and manufacturing, and often in the historiographical context of the pre-conditions for industrialization.32 Other recent research suggests that women were less likely to be involved in those mostly urban occupations in which apprenticeship remained the main means

28 Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers, p. 329; Christopher Brown, ‘British Painting and the Low Countries’, in Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England, 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), p. 27; John Harris, The Artist and the Country House (1979), p. 11; Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, pp. 175–6; Kollmann, Niederlandische Kunstler und Kunst, p. 252. 29 Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, pp. 197–201; Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters (3rd edn, Woodbridge, 1988), p. 216; Daphne Foskett (ed.), A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters (1972), pp. 446–7; Baron Fernand D.G. de Schickler, Les Eglises du Refuge en Angleterre (3 vols, Paris, 1892), II, p. 8 and n.3. 30 John Harris, The Artist and the Country House (1979), p. 12; Christopher Wright, Catherine Gordon and Mary Peskett Smith (eds), British and Irish Paintings in Public Collections (New Haven and London, 2006), p. 471; Col. Maurice Harold Grant, A Dictionary of British Landscape Painters from the 16th Century to the Early 20th Century (Leigh-on-Sea, 1952), p. 55. 31 Suggested, e.g., in the case of Holbein by Susan Foister, Holbein in England (2006), pp. 14, 113; of Dobson by Malcolm Rogers, William Dobson, 1611–1649 (1983), pp. 10–11, and of Van Dyck by Karen Hearn, Van Dyck & Britain (2009), pp. 153–5. 32 Summaries are provided in Marjorie K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620 (Cambridge, 2006), Chapter 2; Anne Laurence, ‘Women in the British Isles in the Sixteenth Century’, in A Companion to Tudor Britain, ed. Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (Oxford, 2009), pp. 382–99. Amy Louise Ericson, ‘Married Women’s Work in Eighteenth Century London’, Continuity and Change, 23:2 (2008), 267–307, offers a historiographic summary in n. 6, with particular reference to the following: Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanization and the Early Phases of Industrialization in England’, in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 65–7; A.L. Erickson, ‘Introduction’ to Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1992), pp. viii–x, and Pamela Sharpe, ‘Continuity and Change: Women’s History and Economic History in Britain’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), 353–69.

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of entry.33 Women in artisanal activities like painting have received but very modest attention, while some of the more extravagant claims for the role of independent female painters in this era, and particularly for figures like Levina Teerlinc and Susanna Horenbout, have failed to withstand close scrutiny.34 Yet a modest number of women were clearly involved in one way or another in the painters’ occupation during this era. They made for a very familiar presence in many a shop. The most important and frequent contribution of women in the workshop will have been in running the household side of the whole, in which the care and feeding of at least the master and apprentices, along sometimes with others as well, remained essential functions. The written record rarely spells out the precise nature of such responsibilities in so many words, but it may reasonably be inferred by the wording of such documents as apprenticeship indentures. Those in Elizabethan Bristol, for example, list the masters’ spouses as well as the masters themselves, suggesting a formal degree of oversight on the part of the woman as well as the man. Such arrangements recognized the common overlap between the apprentice’s responsibilities to both household and workshop. Yet they don’t negate the possibility that some wives may have had a sufficient grasp of the trade itself – imparted by the ‘osmosis of the workshop’ if not by any formal apprenticeship – to participate in the apprentice’s training.35 In the case of painting, we do know that, in addition to their household responsibilities, some native English women will have worked with their husbands in painting or even on their own.36 In 1511, for example, the churchwardens of St Lawrence, Reading, paid the eponymously named John Paynter for finishing up a commission which was ‘…left by the wyff unpainted’. We don’t know why Alice Paynter failed to finish the job, but it cannot have been her death, nor did the failure bring her career to a close. In 1524/5 she, 33

A prominent exception appears in I.K. Ben-Amos, ‘Women Apprentices in the Trades and Crafts of Bristol’, Continuity and Change, 6:2 (1991), 238–42, but see Jane Whittle and Mark Hailwood, ‘The Gender Division of Labour in Early Modern England’, Economic History Review, 73:1 (2020), 3–32. 34 Susan James’s work, chiefly in The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603 (Farnham, Surrey, 2009), has sailed into particularly heavy weather for what one reviewer has called ‘… a particular propensity to convert conjecture into fact’ (review by Diane Wolfthal, in Shakespeare Studies, 14 (2013), 250–3. Many of her claims for the putative production of such figures as Levina Teerlinc and Susanna Horenbout have been found seriously deficient. See also reviews by Marcella Stockstill, Women’s Studies, 38 (July/August, 2009), 600–4, and Robert Tittler, ‘The Feminine Dynamic in Tudor Art: A Reassessment, British Art Journal, 17:1 (Spring, 2016), 123–31. 35 E. Ralph (ed.), Calendar of Bristol Apprenticeship Books, Bristol Record Society, 43 (1992), pp. 54, 111, and 126. 36 Jane Whittle, amongst others, has noted the occasional appearance of this pattern in other occupations as well: Whittle, ‘Enterprising Widows and Active Wives: Women’s Unpaid Work in the Household Economy of Early Modern England’, History of the Family, 19:3 (Sept., 2014), 283–300 and especially 298.

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and not her husband, was paid for painting the tabernacle of St Vincent in the same church.37 The payment clearly shows her working independently. Thomas Sewell of Loughborough had repeatedly done the painting work in that borough’s All Saints church from at least 1617. But by 1635/6 the years had caught up with him so that his wife had to complete a job there. She was paid directly for her work.38 Finishing up for a spouse could work both ways. The wife of the painter John Barber of Leicester (fl.c. 1549–58) worked along with him on gilding the rood carvings of Saints Mary and John in St Martin’s Church during the Marian revival in 1557/8. But she (whose forename is not recorded) was paid separately, suggesting that she worked on her own and not as her husband’s helper.39 The possibility emerges that her husband left Leicester in that year for London, where a namesake is recorded as a painter in the Office of the Revels, and that she took over the Leicester work in his stead and received payment for having done so.40 Many, perhaps most, of the women directly involved in the painters’ trade did so as widows. The key point here is that, in addition to becoming head of the painter’s household upon his death, his widow inherited his membership in the local guild and freemanry. With that membership came the right, in at least most jurisdictions, to maintain ongoing apprenticeships, to employ journeymen, and sometimes even to take on new apprentices under her own aegis. In London as well as in many provincial centres, numerous widows did inherit their husbands’ shops. That inheritance allowed them to exercise their agency to remain single so as to maintain those operations for the next generation, though that might take years to achieve. In early modern Norwich, England’s second largest city, nearly five per cent of all workshops were run by widows, and the proportion seems constant throughout the era.41 York’s City Council agreed as early as 1529 that all freemen’s widows could maintain their family business so long as they did not remarry.42 And though the City 37 Alice

lived on until 1533/4. Edward Croft-Murray, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (1962), p. 29; Rev. Charles Kerry, A History of the Municipal Church of St Lawrence, Reading (Reading and Derby, 1883), p. 67; Berkshire Record Office, MS BRO D/P 97 5/2, /131 and /157, as cited in Alexandra F. Johnston (ed.), St Lawrence Parish, Reading, Berkshire (Records of Early English Drama Pre-Publication Collections, Toronto, n.d. [2018]), p. 2; Roger Rosewell, Medieval Wall Paintings in English and Welsh Churches (Woodbridge, 2008), p. 111. 38 Leicestershire Record Office, MS DG 667/62, (unpaginated; see by date). 39 Thomas North (ed.), Accounts of the Churchwardens of St. Martin’s Leicester (Leicester, 1884), pp. 67, 70, 72, 78, 79, 88, 96. 40 Albert Feuillerat (ed.), Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908), p. 145; Mary Bateson (ed.), Records of the Borough of Leicester, III (Cambridge, 1905), p. 64. 41 Ursula Priestly, P.J. Corfield, and Helen Sutermeister, ‘Rooms and Room Use in Norwich Housing, 1580–1730’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1982), 110. 42 D.M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), p. 150.

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of Coventry prohibited women who had inherited their shops from taking on new apprentices or hiring journeymen,43 not all jurisdictions, including that of London,44 were as restrictive. Particularly for the less affluent, widowhood could be a terrible burden, and remarriage without substantial assets to offer a potential suitor remained a distant prospect. Overall, the wealthier the widow, the greater the assets she could bring to a new relationship, all of which increased her eligibility for remarriage and her attractiveness to potential suitors.45 But if they could manage their affairs, their new-found independence of action may have encouraged some widows in artisanal occupations not to remarry.46 James Ayres has suggested that the painters’ trade, which involved continual exposure to toxic, especially lead-based, materials, may well have shortened the lives of its practitioners and increased the incidence of widowhood.47 Though impossible to support with any hard evidence, the likelihood remains. In addition, as women tended to marry at a substantially earlier age than men and (assuming survival in childbirth) had greater life expectancies, many a painter’s widow was still relatively young at the death of her spouse, and could anticipate many useful years to come. If Ayres is right about the early mortality of painters, numerous widows may well have inherited businesses which were still in full swing and had considerable potential for continuing thereafter. Our best recorded evidence of the widow’s role in these respects comes again from Chester, where just in the opening decades of the seventeenth century nine widows of masters in the Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, succeeded in preserving their husbands’ businesses for the next generation.48 Some of them, including the Widow 43

Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge 1979), p. 92. 44 Vivien Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity, and Family Orientation’, in The World We Have Gained, ed. L. Bonfield, R.M. Smith, and K. Wrightson (1986), pp. 122–54. 45 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (1981), Figures 10.8 and 10.1, pp. 432–4; E.A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, R.S. and R.S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 173–8; Sara Mendleson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 174–6; Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 40–1. 46 The role of preference in widows’ decisions to remarry or not was first broached by Barbara Todd, ‘Demographic Determinism and Female Agency: The Remarrying Widow Reconsidered…again’, Continuity and Change, 9:3 (1994), 421–50. 47 James Ayres, Art, Artisans, and Apprentices: Apprentice Painters and Sculptors in the Early Modern British Tradition (Oxford and Philadelphia, 2014), pp. 71, 83. 48 E.g., widows of the painters John Dewsbury, Nicholas Garse, both Nicholas and Richard Hallwood, William Handcock, Robert Leech, Thomas Pulford, John Thorpe, and William Welch (or Welsh) took over their deceased mates’ freeman’s status and businesses in their era. Save for Anne Dewsbury and Gwen Handcock, their first names remain unrecorded. See Table 4. and Tittler, EMBP, search by name.

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Garse and the better documented Anne Dewsbury, took on journeymen to help them on the shop floor.49 When the Chester painter John Dewsbury died around 1610 or 1612, he left his widow Anne with an active shop, a young son, and several options to consider. One of them came in the form of a courtship brought by Thomas Berchley, a Cestrian who had moved to London fifteen or sixteen years earlier. Hearing of her widowhood, Berchley saw an opportunity to feather his own nest. Under the pretence of helping her raise her children, he petitioned the Painters’ Company of Chester to admit him as a freeman and fellow, so that he could marry the widowed Anne and assume the business with full freeman’s status.50 The strategy was well-precedented and had worked before in Chester,51 but it failed to work for him. Though the Company’s response has not been recorded, his hopes never came to fruition. Either Anne turned him down or the Company refused to admit him so that he abandoned the project. Anne remained a widow, and successfully passed on the family shop to her son Richard when he came of age in 1625/6.52 Another Chester widow made the opposite choice, and one which, as we’ve already seen, proved enormously fortuitous. We’ve already seen how, when the arms painter and deputy herald Thomas Chaloner of Chester died on 14 May 1598 he left his widow Elizabeth, their young son Jacob (1586–1631), and his workshop. Possession of the shop made Elizabeth an attractive catch for Chaloner’s former apprentice Randle Holme, who quickly seized the opportunity to the advantage of all three. All in the same year he married the widow, gained admission to Chester’s Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers and Stationers, and took on her son Jacob, now twelve years old, as his own apprentice.53 The marriage allowed the new Mrs Holme to preserve her husband’s shop and provide for her son. Following his apprenticeship with Holme, Jacob went on to a lucrative career as an arms painter in London.54 Holme might have enjoyed a successful career without that boon to 49

See Table 3, Chester Journeyman Painters. BL, Harleian MS 2104, fol. 105r. 51 Margaret J. Groombridge (ed.), Calendar of Chester City Council Minutes, 1603–1642, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 106 (1956), pp. 24, 26. 52 J.H.E. Bennett (ed.), The Rolls of the Freemen of the City of Chester, part I, 1392–1700 (1906), p. 111. 53 The date of the marriage remains uncertain, but he entered the Company on 3 June of that year, and provided the customary admission dinner to its brethren and wives on 13 November. ODNB, vide Holme, Randle the elder; Joseph C. Bridge, ‘Items of Expenditure from the 16th Century Accounts of the Painters…’, Journal of the Architectural, Archaeological and Historic Society for the County and the City of Chester and North Wales, 20 (1914), 180; CCRO, MS ZG 17/1 (unpaginated; see by date). BL, Harleian MS 2104, fol. 105r. Margaret J. Groombridge (ed.), Calendar of Chester City Council Minutes, 1603–1642, Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 106 (1956), pp. 24, 26. J.H.E. Bennett (ed.), The Rolls of the Freemen of the City of Chester, part I, 1392–1700 (1906), p. 111. 54 Michael Powell Siddons, Welsh Pedigree Rolls (Aberystwyth, 1996), pp. 8, 26–7 and 50

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his fortunes, but Elizabeth proved the critical link (and probably much of the capital) to set him on his feet, and thus to anchor a family dynasty of Chester painters which endured for four generations. The evidence for widows continuing their husband’s business in Chester was not unique to the painters’ trade. It is even more striking amongst the joiners of that city, where just over 18 per cent (24 of 132) of the widows are reckoned to have done the same between the years 1591 and 1721.55 The practice is well precedented elsewhere as well.56 It seems strongest in those workshop-based occupations, including painting and joining, where women were able to absorb many of the required occupational skills through long-term and casual on-site observation: the osmosis of the workshop.57 London’s best known and most successful painter’s widow in these years must surely have been Alice Herne (fl.1570s–80s), whose husband William had been the Queen’s Sergeant-Painter from 1572 until his death in 1580. In 1581 Alice assisted no less a figure than George Gower, Herne’s successor as SergeantPainter, in the decorative painting of bedsteads. She also received payment out of the Great Wardrobe for painting eleven escutcheons for part of a throne or seat.58 In the former instance she probably worked in Gower’s shop. But as Gower was not an arms painter, her production of escutcheons suggests that she had her own workspace. Beyond the barriers to, for example, conventional apprenticeship or guild membership, widows who sought to paint on their own were bound by the same restrictions as anyone else. In 1524/5 the Widow Reade, whose husband Thomas had been a freeman of London but not of Canterbury, joined several male non-freemen in having to pay an annual fee to the latter city for the right to paint within its jurisdiction.59 To have failed to pay would have made her liable to prosecution, which could have been costly. Such a fate awaited a Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry (3 vols, Aberystwyth, 1991–3), I, pp. 51, 305, 318; BL, Harleian MSS 1091, 1362, 1365, 1426, 1449; BL, Additional MSS 26704, 35213, and 47185; CCRO, MS ZG 17/1 (unpaginated; see by date); LGL, MS 11571/10, fol. 104; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 53; Anthony Richard Wagner (ed.), A Catalogue of English Medieval Rolls of Arms (Oxford, 1950), p. 140; Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1558–1639 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 76–7 and 109, n.130. 55 Woodward, Men at Work, p. 87. 56 See, for example, Anne Daly (ed.), Kingston-upon-Thames Register of Apprentices 1563–1713, Surrey Record Society, 28 (1974), pp. 165–6; E. Ralph, Calendar of Bristol Apprenticeship Books, pp. 54, 11, 126; Ben-Amos, ‘Women Apprentices’ and, more broadly, Adolescence and Youth, pp. 145–50. 57 Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 87–9. 58 The name is also rendered as ‘Heron’. James, Feminine Dynamic, 239–41; Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954), pp. 108, 114, 147. 59 J.M. Cowper (ed.), Intrantes; A List of Persons Admitted to Live and Trade within the City of Canterbury, 1392–1592 (Canterbury, 1904), see by name.

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woman known only as ‘the Widow Austin’, probably the widow of the embroiderer Nathaniel Austin, who was cited by the searchers of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London in 1632 for painting without a license.60 She would legally have been able to take on embroidery, the trade to which her inheritance afforded access, but not painting. Of course, not all widows had learned the trade sufficiently to keep at it thereafter or, in the event, even wished to do so. A master painter’s death could well disrupt the contractual arrangements, whether pertaining to apprenticeship or commissioned work, in which he had been involved. Those disruptions could well involve the widow. In such cases an apprentice left hanging at his master’s death could sometimes be taken on under her wing. Alternatively, he could be reassigned by the local guild or company to another master: a not infrequent occurrence in the annals of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London and other such guilds.61 Any partnerships in which the deceased painter had been involved could be settled amicably with some consideration given to the widow. One such post-mortem settlement is well recorded in Chester at the death of William Handcock the younger around 1625. Over a number of years Handcock had partnered with three other Chester painters in a multi-year contract to build, decorate, and maintain the giant and other play figures from that city’s annual Midsummer Show. After William’s death, the three surviving partners, Randle Holme the elder, Nicholas Hallwood, and Robert Thorneley, agreed to pay Hancock’s widow Gwen the sum of 6s. 8d. per annum out of their receipts from that contract. Curiously enough, Gwen accepted the money, but worked to keep her husband’s shop alive anyway. This she did as best she could until her own death in 1638, by which time her son, another William, could take it on himself. Her own skills may have been insufficient for her to retain her husband’s partnership in producing the figures for the Midsummer Show, but they did suffice to retain the shop and pass it on.62 Many a master painter encouraged the succession of his shop by specifically providing for its succession in his will. He might bequeath his equipment and supplies directly to his wife so that she could keep it going, perhaps with the aid of a journeyman, until it could devolve to the next generation. Alternatively, he might leave them directly to an apprentice or journeyman on the condition that the legatee partner with his widow towards the same end. Some such wills might also provide for an apprentice to remain, serving out his term under the widow’s authority. We’ve noted above how the Maldon, Essex, painter Robert Lee bequeathed his ‘late’ apprentice William Eve twenty shillings plus 60 Alan

Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005), p. 57. 61 Painter-Stainers’ Minute Book, pp. 4, 21, 55. 62 CCRO, MS. ZG 17/1 and 2 (unpaginated; see by date); Bridge, ‘Items of Expenditure from the 16th Century Accounts of the Painters,…’, pp. 183–4; Elizabeth Baldwin, Lawrence Clopper, and David Mills (eds), Records of Early English Drama, Cheshire including Chester (2 vols, London and Toronto, 2007), pp. 505–6.

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one half of his tools so that ‘he could become partener with Emme my wife in trade, … and so to continue with her and the profitte rising and compinge of an upon my twoe shoppes’. The other half of those tools were to go to Emme herself, who obviously knew how to use them. Lee also left another twenty shillings to his current apprentice, John Backson, to be paid at the end of his apprenticeship. But he added the condition that Backson complete the same with Emme.63 Marriage obviously played a critical role in these cases, as it also did in the careers of those few female painters who gained access to more aristocratic and even courtly patronage in their time. Some of these favoured few came from abroad with full-fledged careers of their own. A very few – like the portrait painter Joan Carlile (1606–79) or the painter and illustrator Esther Inglis (c.1570/1–1624) – developed careers, and presumably workshops, in England itself in the last years of the era at hand. Carlile, née Palmer, for example, was employed by Charles I as a copyist and portrait painter with a particular reputation for her skill in copying Italian paintings. Her 1626 marriage to the dramatist Lodowick Carlile will have given her some financial security, while his eventual appointment as Groom of the Privy Chamber gained her some access to the court from which she could forge at least a modest career. Barred by her gender from membership in the College of Arms or the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, those connections will have served as alternative points of entry to the painters’ trade. The couple’s comfortable domestic circumstances will have afforded her a place to work.64 While it would be fascinating to know something about the personnel of her workshop, the record remains silent on that score. Esther Inglis’s career hopes also depended on her husband’s situation, though she was less fortunate in this regard than Carlile. Inglis was the daughter of Nicholas Langlois and the calligrapher Marie née Prisott or Presot, from whom she acquired her skills as a painter and calligrapher. Both parents were Huguenots, and they appear to have brought their daughter up in the Huguenot tradition. They had taken her as an infant from Dieppe to England in 1572, and then to Edinburgh in 1578. Around the year 1596 Esther married the minor government official, calligrapher (and probable spy!) Bartholomew Kello in Edinburgh. After 1602 she used the anglicized name of Inglis instead of Langlois, and she moved back to England with Kello around 1607. Without the usual means of access to the trade, she had to rely on him for contacts with potential patrons. Somewhat unusually for the time, she also signed much of her work, perhaps intending such signatures as something of a business card. Even more unusually, she produced a number of images of herself, either as 63

Will of Robert Lee, painter of Maldon, Essex, noted in the Westminster City Archives, MS. ACC 120/Elsam Register fol. 268v. I am grateful to Dr Edward Town for this reference. 64 ODNB, vide Carlile, Joan; M. Toynbee and G. Isham, ‘Joan Carlile (1606?–1679): An Identification’, Burlington Magazine, 96 (1954), 273–7; M. Toynbee, ‘Joan Carlile, Some Further Attributions’, The Connoisseur, 178 (1971), 186–8.

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pen and ink drawings or miniature paintings, with her name and motto, which might well have been intended to the same end (see Fig. 13).65 But though obviously adept at what she did, she never gained the level of patronage which she sought and probably deserved, and she died in straitened financial circumstances in 1624.66 There must have been other women painters as well. In his discussion of pigments, Nicholas Hilliard noted that the ‘excellent whit to be made of quicksilver’ is what ‘the women painters use’, though he may have meant women he encountered in his continental travels rather than those in England.67 Sofonisba Anguissola (1532–1625), sometime court painter to Elizabeth of Valois and Philip of Spain and probably the most distinguished female painter of her generation, appeared briefly in England before returning abroad.68 Sometime between 1635 and 1639 the even more highly celebrated Artemesia Gentileschi (1593–1652/3) followed her father, the illustrious Italian painter Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), to England, her reputation in Italy and elsewhere also notably preceding her. Though her English sojourn was also brief, it was not unproductive. She completed her father’s work on the panels for the Queen’s House at Greenwich; she may have painted portraits and figurative paintings for members of the court circle; and she did produce the striking Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting before leaving England following her father’s death in 1639.69 Neither Anguissola nor Gentileschi appears to have left much of a direct imprint on the English scene. Neither may be taken in almost any way to typify those who painted for a living in the England of that time. As female court painters, they failed to gain the patronage accorded to other well-known continental masters in England, and they lacked the social connections in that host 65 Susan

Frye, ‘Materializing Authorship in Esther Inglis’s Books’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32:3 (Fall, 2002), 469–91; Georgianna Zeigler, ‘Paper Portraits: The Self-fashioning of Esther Inglis’ (30 June, 2020), https://artherstory.net/ the-self-fashioning-of-esther-inglis. 66 ODNB, vide Inglis, Esther; Courtauld Institute, Witt Library painters’ files, vide Inglis/ Langois, Esther; Foskett (ed.), A Dictionary of British Miniature Painters, 349; Michael R. Apted and Susan Hannabuss (eds), Painters in Scotland, 1301–1700: A Biographical Dictionary, Scottish Record Society, n.s., 7 (Edinburgh, 1978), pp. 48–9; Susan Frye, Pens and Needles: Women’s Textualities in Early Modern England (Philadelphia and Oxford, 2010), pp. 102–15; A.H. ScottElliot and Elspeth Yeo, ‘Calligraphic Manuscripts of Esther Inglis (1571–1624): A Catalogue’, The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America, 48 (March, 1990), 11–108; BL, Additional MS 27927, fol. 2 (1599). 67 Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning, ed. and trans. Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston, 1983), p. 31. 68 National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive, painter files, vide Anguissola, Sofonisba; Turner, Dictionary of Art, vide Anguissola, Sofonisba. 69 ODNB, vide Gentileschi, Artemisia; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary, p. 208; Letizia Treves, Sheila Barker, Patrizia Cavazzini, Elizabeth Cropper, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, Larry Keith, and Francesco Solinas, Artemisia (London and New Haven, 2020).

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Fig. 13. Esther Inglis, ‘Self-Portrait’ from her Argumenta Psalmorum (London, 1606).

society which might have attracted it. Yet the genius of their work, coupled with their mere presence in and around court circles, may well have paved the way for the likes of a small number of more successful, native English women painters, Mary Beale (1633–99) foremost amongst them, who began to find their feet in courtly circles in the mid-century and beyond. In sum, and in addition to those few women who developed their own careers as painters, women will not have been entirely unfamiliar figures in the painters’ trade or complete strangers in the painters’ workshop. They served in a number of capacities, usually under the direction of men but sometimes as successors 175

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to those men and/or on their own. They will often have blended their roles in household management with that of the workshop to which it was often physically attached. Beyond that, a very few women, most of them foreigners, will have sustained their own workshops, albeit mostly as consorts to well-connected men whose travels and reputations brooked large in their careers. This discussion of people in the workshop begs several questions about mobility within the workshop structure and within the occupation itself. It begs questions about the ease of entry into the occupation and about mobility through its ranks. How readily could an apprentice expect to complete his indentures and become a journeyman or, eventually, a master? What were the chances that a journeyman might rise to become a master of his own shop? Finally, could there have been any difference between the occupational mobility of painters (and other craftsmen) in the London metropolis, with its population ten times larger than the next most populous English city, and the mobility of those in smaller and more geographically remote venues? These questions about the fluidity of human capital within the occupation have implications for the receptivity of that occupation to new ideas and opportunities. A relatively closed system should work against the intake of new ideas and experiences, entrenching traditional approaches and techniques in the bargain. Modern sociological research has supported the importance of close interpersonal ties amongst friends, neighbours, and relatives in the process of gaining employment.70 It seems reasonable to assume that the prevalence of such close ties in a particular craft would serve to obstruct the overall fluidity of personnel and (albeit inadvertently) discourage the innovation which new blood might bring to that métier. One approach to testing this theory has been to examine the recruitment of apprentices to early modern London. Along with patrimony (the birthright of children born to freemen) and redemption by fee, entrance to the freemanry, with all its attendant rights and privileges, depended on completion of an apprenticeship within the structure of a guild (or, in London, a livery company) or other civic authority. Yet a large-scale examination of apprenticeships in pre-industrial London has found that ‘The typical London apprentice had no identifiable tie to their master through kin or place of origin.’71 Opportunities for newcomers are said to have remained open: the development of human capital remained fluid, new blood flowed freely, and innovation could proceed 70 M. Granovetter, Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers (Chicago, 1974), and J.D. Montgomery, ‘Social Networks and Labor Market Outcomes: Towards an Economic Analysis’, American Economic Review, 81:5 (1991), 1408–18, both as cited in Tim Leunig, Chris Minns, and Patrick Wallis, ‘Networks in the Premodern Economy: The Market for London Apprenticeships, 1600–1740’, Journal of Economic History, 71:2 (June, 2011), 414, n. 3. 71 Leunig, Minns, and Wallis, ‘Networks in the Premodern Economy’, 413–43 and especially 413 and 435.

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apace. It seemed entirely reasonable to apply such a study to London, where some three-quarters of all English apprentices served their time. Though the study did not single out painters amongst the rest, it seems reasonable to assume that its findings will have applied to painters as well as to other occupations. The most detailed directory of painters in this era dedicated to London alone certainly reveals the presence of familial or other such ties within the occupation,72 and as we’ve seen above, a number of London painter-families certainly had long runs over the years. But as a proportion of all London painters, the numbers of such multi-generational clans do indeed seem amply diluted by the constant inflow of newcomers to the ranks, whether from London, elsewhere in the realm, or even – as emphasized in Chapter 2 above – from abroad. Whether the family origins of apprentices offer an accurate guide to occupational fluidity, or whether these London-based patterns pertain to the same degree elsewhere, may still be open question. The completion rate of apprenticeships, and thus the movement from apprenticeship up the rungs to the status of journeyman or master, was so very modest in London and elsewhere,73 that one may well wonder whether assessing the ease of gaining apprenticeship does indeed tell us all we would want to know about the mobility of personnel within an occupation. Then, too, it became increasingly difficult through the latter decades at hand for an apprentice to raise the required capital to set up as a master once he had completed his training. Many such aspirants had little choice but to become journeymen working for others, not bringing any new blood very far into the occupation as they did so.74 Finally, one wonders whether the London experience, in which geographic mobility in and out of the city over the generations remained famously high, would be replicated in smaller, provincial communities where such geographic movement, and especially movement from abroad, may well have been more modest. Where documentation permits us to examine the intake and mobility of painters in provincial centres, a different pattern may well pertain. Once again the well-documented painters’ community of Chester allows us a rare and detailed scrutiny of painters in such a setting. Along with some other archival documentation, the Minute Books of its amalgamated Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers yield detailed information on the apprentices, journeymen, and masters of that Company – the clear preponderance of them painters75 – from the 1530s onwards through the terminal 72

Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’. The same conclusion emerges from the wider data presented in the EMBP database. 73 Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, pp. 311–15; Ben-Amos, ‘Failure to Become Freemen’, passim, and Adolescence and Youth, pp. 130–1; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, pp. 330–5, and especially p. 330 and n.172; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (London and New Haven, 2000), p. 59; Patrick Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and Training in Premodern England’, Journal of Economic History, 68:3 (Sept., 2008), 832–41. 74 D.M. Palliser, Tudor York (Oxford, 1979), p. 150. 75 A degree of ambiguity regarding the occupation of some people at each level precludes

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point of this study at 1640. Detail is especially close from c.1560.76 These sources record at least the admission to each of these three ranks with some care and regularity, so that one may take them as reasonably accurate. They yield eighty apprentices (see Table 2), sixty-three journeymen (Table 3), and sixty-four freemen masters (Table 4) in Company ranks in the eight decades between 1560 and 1640. Amongst a number of observations yielded by these data, these sources show that no fewer than thirty-eight of the eventual masters of that Chester Company – most of them painters – do not appear either to have apprenticed or served as journeymen in Chester. That surprising observation begs some questions. Where did they come from? How else might they have become masters and freemen of the city? And if apprenticeship was not as often the road to advancement as we would anticipate, what do these observations suggest about career mobility within the workshop and the occupation itself in communities like Chester? Some of the Company’s masters may have apprenticed in Chester before registrations began as regularly to be recorded around 1560. Yet only a few masters on the list were admitted in the 1560s or even 1570s when any pre-1560 apprentices would have moved up and been recorded. Some masters may have apprenticed elsewhere, though it is unlikely that such a remote city as Chester will have served as much of a magnet for extra-regional immigration. There may well have been a bias against taking on those from outside the city or region.77 More promisingly, as we have seen, nine of the eventual freemen-masters were widows. Whether or not they actually painted must remain a matter of speculation. Yet most of the widows did, as we’ve noted above, hold places for sons or other relatives who would eventually take over the shop, with Anne Dewsbury being particularly noteworthy in that regard.78 But aside from the widows who gained their status by inheritance and their training, presumably through that osmosis of the workshop, it seems most likely that the majority of the Company’s masters gained access to the freemanry not by apprenticeship, but rather by patrimony or redemption. In sharp contrast to what has been found for London, no fewer than forty-one of the sixty-four Company’s masters recorded between 1560 and 1640 – nearly two thirds – any more precise enumeration of painters as opposed to the other three crafts within the Company. But the preponderance of painters in the membership and governance of the whole is nonetheless clear enough. As there is no suggestion that characteristics of recruitment or advancement differed from one of the four occupations to the other, an analysis of the whole applies equally to each of the four. 76 CCRO, MSS ZCR 63/2/131 (‘Rough Minute Book of the Company of Painter-Stainers, Embroiderers, Glaziers, and Stationers’), ZG 17/1 (‘Minute Book’ of the same, 1575–1621), ZG 17/2 (‘Minute Book’ of the same, 1621 ff.), ZM/AB/1 (‘City Assembly Book, 1539 ff.’), and ZM/AB/2 (‘City Assembly Book, 1624–1689’). 77 Such a bias has been noted in Coventry, for example, where higher admission fees applied to those not apprenticed locally. Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1979), p. 105. 78 Tittler, EMBP, see Dewsbury, Anne.

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were directly and closely related to another master in the same company: as fathers, mothers, sons, step-sons, brothers and, in one case, as a sister.79 Such abundant and close-knit relationships will have provided ample opportunity for advancement through patrimony. It will just as often have allowed family members to provide the required capital for an aspiring master to enter the Company by redemption and set up his own shop. Even without the genealogical sources which would allow us to trace additional relationships through marriage, family groupings within the Company’s masters simply abound. When we extend the search for family ties to those who remained at the journeyman’s level, they do so even more dramatically. As indicated in Tables 2–4, four members of the Framway/Framwell family (a fifth, Ralph Framway, apprenticed, but proceeded no further), seven members of the Hallwood/Hallewood family (including two widow legatees), five members of the Dewsbury family (three journeymen and two masters including a widow/ sister), and four members of the Handcock family (including one widow legatee), considerably swelled the Company’s top ranks in these years, with numerous widows amongst them, as we have seen, providing intergenerational links. Despite their eligibility to gain their status through patrimony, four men had even undertaken a traditional apprenticeship with their fathers.80 A fifth, Jacob Chalonor, completed his apprenticeship with his step-father, Randle Holme I, in about 1612, but then relocated, as we have seen, to London, where he gained admission to the Painter-Stainers’ Company by redemption in 1614.81 It is not difficult to fathom why a craft guild in a provincial community like Chester will have had the tightly knit personnel which could produce these characteristics. As noted in a previous chapter, and in marked contrast to the solar orb of London, whose gravitational pull for recruitment was virtually national and even international,82 Chester was but a small orbiting moon. Its mostly poor agricultural hinterland remained sparsely settled and geographically isolated. Its regional gentry remained remarkably stable over the generations.83 Whilst some Cestrians like Jacob Chaloner and Daniel King may have been lured to the economic opportunities of London, Chester will not have served as much of a magnet for incoming migrants. The eleven recorded Chester apprenticeships which reveal places of origin show one from Dublin and one from London,84 but all the others from the immediate area of Chester. They include one from Hawarden, across the Welsh border but only 6 miles from 79

See Table 4 and also Tittler, EMBP, search by name. James Handcock with William Handcock; Randle Holme II and William Holme with Randle Holme I; Thomas with Thomas Prickett II. This was far from a unique phenomenon in urban communities of the time, and a few such jurisdictions, including Coventry, required sons to apprentice. 81 Tittler, EMBP, vide Chaloner, Jacob. 82 Leunig, Minns, and Wallis, ‘Networks in the Premodern Economy’, 420 and fig. 2A. 83 See above, p. 100. 84 These were John, the son of Edward Dixon, a London Haberdasher, who was apprenticed 80

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Chester and well within its hinterland.85 That smaller and more intimate scale of activity suggests how the characteristics of apprenticeship, as well as other aspects of the painter’s trade, may well have differed in a venue like Chester from the better known metropolitan scene of London or, presumably, even the more densely settled provincial areas and geographically central areas like the southeast or East Anglia. Given these contextual characteristics, it should not be surprising that this evidence from Chester contrasts with the perceived absence of strong inter­ personal ties between apprentices and masters in London. Chester’s pattern of close familial ties within the occupation inevitably sustained a much greater insularity and inaccessibility to newcomers than appears to have been the case in London. It also appears that apprenticeship in Chester failed to provide a particularly promising route to advancement within that trade and city, just as it often failed to do elsewhere in England at this time.86 Those with strong family ties within the community had less need to rely on formal apprenticeships, and were more likely to advance than those lacking such ties. In a larger sense, and when added to what has been shown for London, these findings also suggest that, at least in the era at hand here, an inverse proportion may pertain between the size and centrality of the community and the insularity of its craft production. Given adequate documentation, one might well find that similar crafts in smaller and middling communities like Chester were more likely to have been dominated by only a few families over the course of many decades. It remains noteworthy, for example, that five of the nine painters who have been identified in Nantwich87 between c.1589 and 1649 were Duttons;88 five of the eight painters identified in Ipswich89 between 1529 and 1639 were Brames;90 four of the nine painters identified in Shrewsbury91 between 1550 and 1630 were

to William Handcock in 1622, and Thomas, the son of William Ratliffe of Dublin, apprenticed to William Poole in 1600. Neither completed their apprenticeships. 85 John Davies, who apprenticed with William Poole in 1609. 86 See above, note 2. 87 Nantwich is just to the southeast of what is conventionally reckoned to be the hinterland of the city of Chester. Its population has been estimated at c. 2,200 in 1563; Peter Clark and Jean Hosking (eds), Population Estimates of English Small Towns 1550–1851 (2nd edn, Leicester, 1993), p. 13. 88 Tittler, EMBP, search Nantwich. 89 Population estimated at c. 5,000 in 1603; John Patten, English Towns, 1500–1700 (Folkstone, Kent, 1978), p. 251. 90 Tittler, EMBP, search Ipswich. 91 Population, including the Abbey Foregate, estimated at c. 5,500 in 1587; W.A. Chapman, ‘The Frankpledge Population of Shrewsbury, 1500–1720’, Local Population Studies, 41 (1988), pp. 55–6.

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Cleys;92 and four of six painters identified in Plymouth93 between c.1570 and 1639 were Sprys (or Spries).94 Such continuity of personnel in smaller, provincial communities may also help account for the notorious sluggishness with which such crafts in these areas adopted new fashions and techniques, and for the consequent perpetuation of local and regional craft production. It no doubt played a part in the persistence of the local and regional vernacular in provincial communities well into and beyond the seventeenth century. Not only will visual fashions and styles have made their way slowly from London to more remote areas of the realm, but the people who might have conveyed and contributed such innovations seem to have moved slowly as well. Table 2. Apprentices: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640 Name

Master

from

to

(M) = eventual master ap Richard (Prichette?), Thomas Barbour/Barber, Thomas

1640

Barker, William

Taylor, John

1630

Beithell, William

Wright, John

1630

(M)Bellen, Edward

Holme, Randle I

1624

Birchenshaw, Edward

Handcock, William

1619

Boydell, John

Allen, John

1573

Broughton, Richard

Holme, Randle I

1624

Butler, Daniel

Taylor, William

1635

(M)Calley/Kelley, Richard

Fynchet, Henry

c.1555

Chaloner, Jacob

Holme, Randle I

c.1598

Charlton, Henry

Framway, John

1610

Cooke, Jeffrey

Holme, Randle I

1601

Cooper, John

Hancock, William

1596

Dale, William

Walshe, William

1623

92 Tittler,

1634

1634 by 1563

EMBP, search Shrewsbury. Population estimated at between 8,000 and 9,000 in 1595; E.A. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971), p. 15. 94 Tittler, EMBP, search Plymouth. 93

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Name

Master

from

Davies, John

Poole, William

1609

Dixon, John

Handcock, William

1601

Dixon, William

Handcock, William

1622

Duke, Richard

King, Daniel

1640

Fletcher, Richard

Holme, Randle

1612

(M)Frameway, John I

Poole, Thomas

1567

(M)Frameway, John II

Hallwood, William

1587

Framway, Ralph

Frameway, William I (father) 1573

(M)Framway, William II

Hallwood, Nicholas

1580s?

Frances, Thomas

Frameway, William I

1583

Gilbert, Richard

Hallwood, Nicholas

1600

Griffith, Thomas

Bellen, Edward

1635

Gyll, William

Picke, William

1571

(M)Hallwood, Nicholas

Pentney, Thomas

1602

(M)Hallwood, Ralph

Pentney, Thomas

1588

(M)Handcock, James

Handcock, William I

1620s

(M)Handcock, William I

Hallwood, Ralph

1588

Hatton, John

Handcock, William II

1614

(M)Holme, Randle I

Chaloner, Thomas

1588

(M)Holme, Randle II

Holme, Randle I

1627

Holme, Richard

Chaloner, Thomas

1587

(M)Holme, William

Holme, Randle I

1617

Howe, Richard

Handcock, William

1599

Hughes, Ralph

Holme, Randle I

1617

Johnson, Randle

Wright, Edward

1615

Jones, Nicholas

Poole, William

1615

Johnes, Thomas

Souch, John

1621

Ketfyn, Thomas

Wright, John

1626

(M)King, Daniel

Holme, Randle I or II

1626

Madocke, John

Allen, John

1573

Man, Richard

Holme, Randle I or II

1630

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to

pre-1620

1622

1639

Name

Master

from

Murrey, Robert

Leche, Robert

1590

Owen, John

Taylor, John

1632

Pilkinton, Anthony

Thorneley, Robert

1635

Pilkinton, Edward

Frameway, John

1615

Poole, John

Leche, Robert

1583

Poole, John

Poole, William

1617

Powell, John

Allen, John

1573

Poynton/Poyser, Edward

Wright, John

1635

(M)Prickett, Thomas II

Prickett, Thomas I

Proby, John

Leche, Robert

1577

Proby, Peter

Leche, Robert

1578

(M)Pulford, Thomas

Souch, John

1627

Ratliffe, Thomas

Handcock, William

1623

(M)Robinson, Thomas

Poole, William

1600

Shevington, Ffulke

Wayte, Robert

1585

(M)Sidall, John

Souch, John

1627

Sid(d)all, Robert

Sidall, John (father)

1637

Sier, John

Thorneley, Robert

1609

(M)Souch, John

Holme, Randle I

(?)

Staneley, William

Blessing, Thomas

1633

Sutton, William

Chaloner, Thomas

1596

Taylor, Joshua

Taylor, William (brother)

1635

(M)Taylor, William

Framway, John

1624

Thorneley, Nicholas

Thorneley, Robert (father)

1624

Thorneley, Robert

Leche, Robert & Emma

1597

1605

(M)Thorpe, John

Poole, William

1635

1642

(M)Walker, Randle

Wright, John

1635

1641

Willington, Anthony

Leche, Robert

1583

(M)Wright, John

Thorneley, William

1620

Total: 80/(M) 22

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to

pre-1640 1636

1617

1631

c.1626

Table 3. Journeymen: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640 Name (M) = eventual Chester Master

Master

Dates

Ap Robert, David

Randle Holme I

1612–14

Banks, James

John Taylor

1626

Barbor, Thomas

John Wright

1640

Basnett, Robert

?

1595/6

(M)Bellin, Edward

Randle Holme I

[Briefly before becoming master in 1634]

Benet, Humphrey

Randle Holme I

1629, 1630

Birch, John

Robert Thorneley

1626

Blackbourne, [Mr.]

Daniel King

1640

Bouell/Bovell, John

?

1598

(M)Chaloner, Thomas

?

1582; admitted master 1584

Chester, John

Anne Dewsbury (widow)

1614/15

Clapham, John

Ralph Hallwood

1590

Cooke, Jeffrey

William Poole

1631, 1632, 1633

Davys, Thomas

?

1601

de Villegrande, Jacob

Randle Holme I

1598

Dewsbury, George

Anne Dewsbury (widow)

1613–14

Dewsbury, John II

probably John Dewsbury I

1603

Dewsbury, Thomas

John Allen

1600–01

Drinkwater, James

?

1618

Glazier, Richard

Robert Wayte

1584

Gostilowe, William

John Allen

1599–1600

Halliwell, Richard

Widow Garse

1617–18

Harmer, Samuel

Randle Holme I

1608

Hessett, Samuel

Randle Holme I

1609

Hinchley, George

John Walker

1626

Holme, John

probably William Holme (father)

1609–13.

Humphrey, John

Thomas Prickett I

1593

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Name (M) = eventual Chester Master

Master

Dates

Jackson, Thomas

Robert Thorneley

1612

Leigh, Thomas I

Anne Dewsbury (widow) John Souch

1615 1618, 1619

Leigh, Thomas II

Edward Bellin

1642, 1643

Morris, John (II)

Thomas Wayte

1617

Newman, Henry

?

1609–13

Parmer, Samuel

Randle Holme I

1609

Peake, Luke

Randle Holme I and Wm. Poole 1610

Percival, (?)

William Handcock

1602/3.

Pincer, Henry

Edward Bellen

1635

Poyser, Edward

John Wright/ Randle Holme I John Wright

1629 1630

Prickett/Prichett, George

Nicholas Hallwood Robert Thorneley William Taylor John Wright

1627–28 1630–32 1633, 1625 1626, 1637

(M)Prickett, Thomas II

Thomas Prickett I (father)

1612, 1616–18

Proby, John

licensed 1585

Pryley, William

?

1600

(M)Robinson, Thomas

William Poole

1612 and then admitted to freemanry 1612

Romney, William

Robert Leech

1595–1600 after apprenticing with Leech as well.

Rotheram, Thomas

Anne Dewsbury (widow)

1616

Salford, Edward

Randle Holme I

1605, 1606

Shevington, Fulke

?

1598–1600

(M)Siddal/Sydall, John

?

1605

Smith, Christopher

Thomas Wayte

1612

Smith, Jeremy

John Dewsbury

1598–99

Smith, Thomas

William Taylor

1643 (but fl.1629–43)

Sutton, John

?

1585, 1590

Sutton, Richard

?

licensed, 1585

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Name (M) = eventual Chester Master

Master

Dates

(M)Walker, John

?

1587

Wayte, James

?

1598

Wayte, Thomas

?

1599, 1600

Wilkinson, Thomas

John Allen

1589

Wilson, Justinian

?

licensed as journeyman, 1584

Withie, Richard

?

1598

Total: 63/ (M) 6

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Table 4. Masters: Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers, c. 1560–1640 Name

Apprenticed with

Apprenticed

Allen, John Bellen, Edward

Death

fl. c. 1573 Randle Holme I

1624

Blessing, Thomas Calley/Kelley, Richard

Freeman

Henry Fynchet

adm. 1634

1650

1632

post -1650

fl. 1563/4

Capper, John

to 1580

1580

Chaloner, Thomas

adm. 1584

1598

Dewsbury, Anne (Widow)

fl. 1612–16

Dewsbury, John I

fl. 1579–93

Edmunds, Robert

adm. 1590

c. 1593

Framway, John I

Thomas Poole

fl. 1586–99

d.c. 1599

Framway, John II

William Hallwood

adm. 1605

post-1631

Framway, William I Framway, William II

fl.1573–83 Nicholas Hallwood

fl.c. 1588–92

1598/9

Fulwood, Robert

fl. 1564

Fynchet, Henry

fl. 1563

Garse, Nicholas

fl. by 1598–c. 1617

d.c. 1617

Garse, Widow

1617–18

d. c. 1618

Hallwood, Christopher

fl. 1619 ff.

1650

fl. by 1588

1629

fl. 1588–96/7

1596/7

fl. to 1592/3

1592/3

Hallwood, Nicholas

Thomas Pentney

Hallwood, Ralph

Thomas Pentney

Hallwood, Richard

1574

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Name

Freeman

Death

Hallwood, Robert

fl. 1564–83

d.c. 1583

Hallwood, Widow of Nicholas

fl. 1630–38

1638

Hallwood, Widow of Richard

fl. 1592/3–1639/40

d.c.1640

Handcock, James

Apprenticed with

Apprenticed

William I

fl. 1630s

Handcock, Widow Gwen Handcock, William I

Ralph Hallwood

1588

Handcock, William II

fl. 1625–38

1638

adm. 1596

1625

fl. 1630–35

1635?

Holme, Randle I

Thomas Chaloner

1587

fl. 1597/8–1655

d. 1655

Holme, Randle II

Randle Holme I

1617

fl. 1620s–56

d. 1656

Holme, William

Randle Holme I

1617

adm. 1622

d. 1622

King, Daniel

Randle Holme I or II

1630

adm. 1639

d. post -1649

Knowlesley, James

fl. 1567 ff.

Leech, Emma (Widow)

fl. 1599–1603

Leech, Richard

fl. 1547–59

Leech, Robert I

fl. 1550s–75

1599/1600

Leech, Robert II

fl. 1558–99

d. 1603/4

adm. 1643

post 1650

Pentney, Thomas

fl. 1574–pre-1620

d. by 1620

Picke, William

fl. 1557/8–1572/3

d. 1572/73

Poole, Thomas

fl. 1567

Poole, William

adm. 1600

Prickett, Ralph

fl. 1591–96

Morrey, Robert

c. 1633/34

d.1603/4

d.c.1642

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Name

Apprenticed with

Apprenticed

Prickett, Thomas I Thomas Prickett I

Pulford, Thomas

John Souch

fl. 1616–22 1627

Pulford, Widow of Thomas William Poole

1600

Shevington, William Sidall/Sydall, John

John Souch

1627

Skellington, George Souch, John

Death

fl. pre-1591–c. 1624

Prickett, Thomas II

Robinson, Thomas

Freeman

Randle Holme I

1607

Taylor, John

adm. 1636

1646

fl. 1642–post-1650

post-1650

adm. 1612

d. 1642

adm. 1563/4

d. 1598

adm. 1636

d. 1637

adm. 1637

d.1646

adm. 1617

d. 1645

adm. c. 1614

post-1649

Taylor, William

John Framwell

1624

adm. 1631

d. 1646

Thorneley, Robert

Robert & Emma Leech

1597

adm. 1605/6

post-1650

Thorpe, John

William Poole

1635

adm. 1642

d. 1645

Thorpe, Widow of John

1646

d. 1646 ?

Walker, Christopher

adm. 1626

1642

Walker, John

fl. 1587–1611

d. c. 611?

adm. 1641

d. post-1649

Walker, Randle

John Wright

1635

Wayte, Robert

fl. 1585–91

Welch, Widow of William

fl. 1632–46

d. 1646

Welch, William

fl. 1617–32

d. 1631/2

c. 1626–post- 1650

d. post-1650

Wright, John Total: 64

William Thorneley

1620

8 The Workshop Space Consideration of the workshop must address its working space as well as its personnel. Apprentices, journeymen, secondary painters, masters, and even masters’ spouses all interacted within particular physical premises. Any understanding of their activities must appreciate how and where they did so. The very diversity of such spaces makes this a challenging task, but archaeological and archival evidence permits us at least to begin to cast aside some myths and to make some pertinent observations.1 One of the myths concerns the romantic trope of the starving painter working in his garret. To this attractive image there is at least some logic. Like the weaver, who could work at his loom in the fading daylight if it were located in an enlarged top storey window, a painter would have better light and for a longer time in the day if he carried out his work in the higher elevation of a garret. Garrets are first recorded in London houses in 1483. By the Elizabethan era they were not infrequently heated so that they could be employed as living spaces.2 The population pressure of the intervening years created an insatiable demand for additional residential space. As the density of building sites and the narrowness of urban building plots precluded much further horizontal expansion, buildings grew, as they do in the City of London today, upwards rather than outwards. By the early seventeenth century some London buildings reached five storeys,3 and many will have had garrets. Hilliard, for one, would probably have liked the idea of a garret, as he placed such emphasis on working in ‘… a cleare story, in a place wher neither dust, smoak, noise, nor stenche may offend’.4 The statement is part of his deliberate emphasis on the importance of cleanliness in the workshop. He admonished painters to avoid shedding dust, hairs, or dandruff, and to refrain from speaking 1 Particularly helpful to the understanding of London housing and attendant spaces in this era are John Schofield’s studies of Ralph Treswell’s London surveys, published as Schofield (ed.), The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell, London Topographical Society Publications, 135 (1987). See also Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London, c. 1600 (Philadelphia, 2000) and essays especially by Schofield and Orlin herself, who considers the evidence of the London Viewers regarding boundary disputes. 2 Garrets may first have appeared in London warehouses and similar industrial building as early as c. 1300: Queenhithe is recorded as having one in 1310. But they came later to the city’s residential buildings. John Schofield, Medieval London Houses (London and New Haven, 1994), pp. 21, 81. 3 Schofield, The London Surveys, p. 15. 4 Arthur F. Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon (eds), Nicholas Hilliard’s Art of Limning (Boston, 1983), p. 22.

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over a painting so as to spatter the work with spittle. He emphasized the importance of working with pure water, clean brushes, and the purest of pigments. He also favoured working in a northern exposure: ‘… let your light be no[r]thwrd, somewhat toward the east which commonly is without sune Shininge in … only light great and faire let it be, and without impeachment or reflections, or walls, or trees…’.5 We may take these preferences for working space and light to have been shared by all serious painters of his time.6 Yet, though a garret, which might reach out and above neighbouring structures, may perfectly have satisfied those conditions, it is not clear that Hilliard himself actually worked in one. Situated for some thirty-five years on London’s Gutter Lane, which ran northwards from the east/west thoroughfare of Cheapside,7 his tenement would have had to tower over its neighbour to the north and have a northside window in order to enjoy any northern light in its top storey. Yet while we know that Cheapside buildings, especially in the short stretch around the corner from Gutter Lane known as Goldsmith’s Row, did reach such heights, it is unlikely that Hilliard’s two-block long side street off that artery could boast the same. In addition, buildings that towered over their next-door neighbours, thus affording a view into the property of the latter, could be seen as violating the ancient principle enshrined in the late twelfth-century Assize of Building and subsequent documents. That long-standing convention conferred on a landowner the air rights over his plot and guarded against anyone having an unobstructed view of his property from above. A taller building might be built, but not with windows on his neighbour’s side.8 Most likely, Hilliard was describing in that passage the ideal conditions in which his ‘gentle’ readers might have worked, rather than observing the conditions in which most painters, at least in densely settled London, actually did work. The archaeological evidence places most urban workshops of that era on the ground floor, identifying the garret as a place of storage or occasional living space for apprentices or journeymen.9 In provincial centres, less pressed for building space in these years than the great and rapidly growing metropolis, garrets commonly emerged only after the mid-seventeenth century,10 and were even less frequently used as places of production.

5

Ibid., p. 22. . See the valuable discussion in Susie Nash, Northern Renaissance Art (Oxford, 2008), pp. 158–61. 7 Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (London and New Haven, 2019), p. 169. 8 Vanessa Harding, ‘Space, Property, and Propriety in Urban England’, Journal of Interdiscipinary History, 32:4 (March, 2002), 559–60. 9 Schofield, Medieval London Houses, p. 81. 10 Ursula Priestly, P.J. Corfield, and Helen Sutermeister, ‘Rooms and Room Use in Norwich Housing, 1580–1730’, Post-Medieval Archaeology, 16 (1982), 116–19. 6

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Another common view of the workshop has a master at the head, supervising an apprentice or two to do the more menial tasks, perhaps a journeyman with intermediate skills and experience in between, and with a wife running the domestic side of the whole. In physical terms, such a shop will have been appended to, or co-terminus with, the master’s residence, with such porous divisions as doorways or staircases often delineating the two spaces and functions. That picture would indeed describe a great many painters’ workshops in provincial as well as metropolitan England. It applied, for example, to the modestly successful Banbury painter Thomas Jemson, whose 1622 inventory post mortem indicates no physical distinction between working and living space.11 It will also have applied on a much larger scale to Randle Holme’s workshop cum residence in the large three-storey house in Chester’s Lower Bridge Street as shown in Figure 11.12 Similar multi-purpose spatial arrangements, if not usually so extensive, were the norm in York,13 Norwich,14 and undoubtedly other large towns and cities as well. Yet most of the very successful painters, those who could afford to keep two or even more apprentices and a journeyman or so as well, often required more space than the basic quasi-residential arrangement will have provided. Apprentices had to be housed as well as trained. Most journeymen will normally have lived on their own, but they still required workspace within the shop. Space will have had to be found to work on and store the larger panels required especially in, for example, pre-Reformation triptychs and other such large works. And while some of these secondary or associated painters will have had their own shops and received work outsourced to them, others will have been given temporary workspace to complete a specific task in the principal master’s premises. All painters’ shops will have had to accommodate the supplies, equipment, and furniture essential to the trade. In addition to the basic furniture of benches or tables, drawing frames and desks, chairs or stools, wooden tripods and easels, these will have included shelves on which to store pattern books and drawings, pigments, candles, oils, gums, solvents, possibly dyes, and other substances, along with a number of hand-held pallets on which to hold and 11 E.R.C. Brinkworth and J.S.W. Gibson (eds), Banbury Wills and Inventories, part 2, 1621–1650, Banbury Historical Society, 14 (Banbury, 1976), p. 15. 12 As it now stands, in the form of Ye Olde King’s Head, much renovation has taken place over the years, though the main dimensions appear original. The house was large enough to host a meeting of the Chester Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers in 1643 when what had become the regular meeting place at the Golden Phoenix Inn had been commandeered for billeting troops in the Civil War. CCRO, MS ZCR63/2/131 fol. 53r. In addition to serving as a painter’s residence and workshop, the edifice had to accommodate Holme’s multiple additional employments as a deputy herald and civic official. It will have been much larger than most painters’ houses, especially in London, where land values were higher and buildings more densely packed. 13 D.M. Palliser, Tudor York (1979), p. 138. 14 Priestley et al., ‘Rooms and Room Use’, 109–10 and Fig. 5.

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blend paints while painting. Bins and trunks will have accommodated wooden panels and supplies of canvas, brushes, quills, various pots, pans, and ceramic vessels, as well as the grinding stones and mullers used in the preparation of pigments. Space will have been required on which to stack and store panels completed or in process of being completed. Painters who also did arms painting, or glass painting, or limning, additionally required the tools of those particular specialities.15 It goes without saying that the larger and more complex operations required more workmen and more space to house them. Glass painting, as we have seen above, required a particularly large area to accommodate the several stages of its production. In 1532, for example, Henry VIII gave the glazier and glass painter Galyon Hone permission to employ six foreign journeymen in his Southwark workshop instead of the statutory limit of two, and he must have had the space in which they could work. Some other painters’ workshops engaged in an equally diverse production. Hone’s contemporary Holbein was one of them. In order to have completed all the works attributed to him, and to have worked in such diverse visual media, he must surely have kept on several apprentices and journeymen at a time. That pattern must have become more common at the end of the sixteenth century and beyond in the workshops of people at the top of their profession like de Critz, Gheeraerts, Peake, Gower, Mytens, Johnson, and then Rubens and Van Dyck. A man like Rowland Buckett, who took on extensive decorative commissions for all manner of aristocratic and courtly personnel, must have had extensive storage space for equipment as well as workshop space for his workers. And arms painters, whose commissions, e.g. for a single armigerous funeral, will have entailed a number of components of one sort or another, required ample space in which to produce and store them prior to delivery. Such large-scale operations will often have included more than one building to contain all their activities. The reconstruction of London buildings and street plans of the era indicates a veritable rabbit warren of structures with non-contiguous as well as contiguous occupancy which (however inconveniently) served such requirements.16 They consisted not only of actual working spaces, but sometimes also of spaces for storage and/or retail sales. Robert Peake, for example, is said to have had his own workshop in a leased tenement in Green Dragon Court in the parish of St Sepulchre from 1583 to at least 1600. By 1611, when he was selling copies of Serlio and other books, he had a shop nearby at Holborn Conduit next to the ‘Sunne Taverne’. And by the time of his death in 1619 he was living in Old Bailey and also held a house in what appears to 15

A detailed and nearly contemporary description of much of this paraphernalia, along with the design and construction of particular items, may be found in Randle Holme III, The Academy of Armory (1688), Book III, Chap. 9, pp. 369–70. 16 Dorian Gerhold (ed.), London Plotted: Plans of London Buildings c. 1450–1720, London Topographical Society Publication, 178 (2016), passim.

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have been a rental property in Houndsditch.17 He may well have held the first three premises simultaneously, or moved successively from one to another. But his retail shop was unlikely to have been where he plied his craft. The weight of recent research emphasizes the spatial separation of the two functions as the more common pattern.18 The Green Dragon Court property contained a hall, several cellars, and sundry other rooms. It will have provided ample space for his family, including at least two sons, and for his workshop with its several apprentices who will have lived for years at a time with the rest of the family. In his latter years Peake gave over his shop to his son William, moving on himself to a purely residential premises a few minutes’ walk away at Old Bailey.19 A similar arrangement pertained to the well-established Painter-Stainer Robert Greenwood, who lived with his family and probably had his workshop in the parish of St John Zachary, but who also kept a retail shop in St Ann’s Lane.20 Painters in provincial settings, where property values tended to be lower and the pattern of settlement less dense, may more often have kept their operations to a single location as did Randle Holme the elder in Chester. But there were exceptions. In the small Essex town of Maldon the painter Robert Lee noted in his will the two shops in which his widow was to work with his apprentice.21 Yet London’s dramatic population growth and density from the mid-sixteenth century on made the provision of adequate working space a greater challenge for its artisans than for those situated elsewhere. It did so even for painters of lesser status and income, and it made the use of multiple spaces, or combinations of working space and residence, more common. Such complexity often extended to the sharing of a single space by two or more occupants, each pursuing his own work, with the division of possession (along with the responsibility for upkeep and repair!) not even necessarily demarcated by a physical barrier such as a wall or screen. The records of the Viewers appointed by the City of London are full of disputes over the retention and repair of such shared spaces, in which one part of a room might be leased by one person and the other part of the same room leased by another with a disputed boundary between them. In 1536, controversy between the prominent Painter-Stainer Richard Callard (d.1544) and the embroiderer Thomas Typlady over the shared space 17

ODNB, vide Peake; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 152; TNA, E.179/146/369f/27. The reference to Green Dragon Court in St Sepulchre may be mistaken, as the only London place of that name identified in Giles Darkes (ed.), A Map of Tudor London: England’s Greatest City in 1520, London Topographical Society [2018], is in Southwark. 18 See especially the summary provided in Jane Grenville, ‘The Archaeology of the Late and Post-Medieval Workshop: A Review and Proposal for a Research Agenda’, in The Vernacular Workshop: From Craft to Industry, 1400–1900, ed. P.S. Barnwell, Marilyn Palmer, and Malcolm Airs, Council for British Archaeology (York, 2004), pp. 28–37. 19 Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 152–3; ODNB, vide Peake, Robert. 20 Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 97–8; National Library of Scotland, MS GB233/ Adv.MS.31.4.6, fol. 88v. 21 Westminster City Archives, MS ACC 120/Elsam Register fol. 268v. I am grateful to Dr Edward Town for this reference.

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of a cellar warehouse, chamber, and garret resulted in the requirement that internal partitions be erected to demarcate one’s entitlement from the other.22 Odd as it may seem to us now, no such physical demarcation between the two operations had existed prior to that time. Given the expense of street frontage in London and other more densely settled urban areas, most buildings will have been set with narrow frontages perpendicular to the street and extending back from there. In many cases, smaller, less densely settled towns, where land values were lower, will have allowed wider street frontages so as to accommodate a building plan parallel to the street, though the establishment of permanent retail shops (as opposed to actual workshops) in such more modest communities will have emerged much more slowly than in London.23 Because the building front will have offered the best light and the most visible display, it was the most likely space for a retail shop and/or workshop in those communities. The ground floor rear became the second most likely space for the workshop.24 Storage of supplies such as panels, frames, bolts of canvas, mullers, oils, dyes, or tubs for mixing paints may have been relegated to the cellar when required. The largest and most cumbersome piece of some painters’ equipment will probably have been a ladder. While many work sites like parish churches possessed their own ladders25 or maintained arrangements to borrow them from parishioners when required,26 some painters will have owned their own.27 Ladders took up space. Arms painters may not have required ladders unless they were painting or gilding the royal arms over the church chancel, and most panel painters will not have required them at all. But painters of all work may well have required them for one commission or another, especially in ecclesiastical settings where walls could extend quite high.

22

Janet S. Loengard (ed.), London Viewers and their Certificates, 1508–1558, London Record Society, 26 (1989), pp. 51–2, et passim. For a wider discussion, see Orlin, ‘Boundary Disputes in Early Modern London’, in Orlin, Material London, pp. 345–76. 23 Leigh Alston, ‘Late Medieval Workshops in East Anglia’, in The Vernacular Workshop, ed. Barnwell et al., p. 38. 24 David Clark, ‘The Shop Within? An Analysis of the Architectural Evidence for Medieval Shops’, Architectural History, 43:1 (2000), 61–4, Fig. 3 and 79–80; Schofield, London Surveys, p. 22; Schofield, Medieval London Houses, pp. 71–4 and Figs 78 and 79; Gerhold, London Plotted, pp. 24–5. 25 Examples include the parishes of St Mary Magdalene, Lydd; St Chad, Stafford; and St Martin Ongar, London; Arthur Finn (ed.), Records of Lydd (Ashford, 1911), p. 381; Staffordshire Record Office, Biddulph St Lawrence Parish Book, MS D3539/2/1, fol. 4r.; Lambeth Palace Library, MS CM9/14, fol. 4r. 26 E.g., the churchwardens of Durham St Oswald maintained such an arrangement with George Racket for the loan of a ladder in 1634, paying him 16d. for the loan and transport so that they could paint their church. Durham Record Office, MS EP/DU S0203, fol. 4r. 27 E.g., the Rochester painter Thomas Peachey left three ladders to his former apprentice Timothy Garse in his will of 1578; LMA, MS DL/AL/C/002/MS09051/4/152.

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Some shop spaces and some whole shops were given over by the mid-sixteenth century to the display and sale of painted work. Retail shops themselves were of course no great novelty in the London of this era. Derek Keene has reminded us that they existed in London even by 1300 and possibly even earlier.28 Many of the more substantial market towns had retail shops by the end of the sixteenth century as well; many had had them long before.29 Goods whose possession certified a buyer’s social or economic status scored particularly well in the retail trade, and paintings of one sort or another figured amongst them. Though, as Linda Levy Peck, has asserted, ‘…there were no shops [by the opening of the seventeenth century] in which to buy the Tintorettos and Bassanos that courtiers now clamoured for’,30 one needn’t have been a courtier or collected works of the great continental masters to exercise the urge to buy a painting.31 There were certainly by that time a multitude of shops where consumers could purchase some forms of painted work, and they might quite possibly, at least in London, purchase copies at least of these continental masters. Over the period at hand, even high-end painters like Peake began more often to engage in the retail trade. That tendency further extended the function and very concept of the workshop, and added even more spatial requirements to the whole. The description of his Green Dragon Court workshop makes no mention of retail space. That function must have been served by Peake’s Holborn Conduit shop, which may not have been more than a sales room for paintings and books. Most retail shops were typically small affairs. The lock-ups alongside a London church like St Botolph Aldgate, which are estimated to have measured only four to five feet deep, will have been a common feature of the London scene.32 The shop taken ‘at the church door’ of St Peter Westcheap by the painter William Wiggington (d.1582) between 1556 and 157433 sounds like little more than a stall or simple lock-up.34 It will likely have been inadequate for 28

Derek Keene, ‘Shops and Shopping in Medieval London’, in Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Medieval London, ed. Lindy Grant, British Archaeological Association (1990), pp. 29–40. 29 Jon Stobart, ‘The Shopping Streets of Provincial England, 1650–1840’, in The Landscape of Consumption: Shopping Streets and Cultures in Western Europe, 1600–1900, ed. Jan Hein Fornée and Clé Lesger (Basingstoke, 2014), p. 17. 30 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Building, Buying, and Collecting in London’, in Orlin, Material London, p. 280. 31 For the development of a public for portraiture especially which dipped well below the social ranks of the aristocracy, see the pioneering work of Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and other Works of Art in Sixteenth Century English Inventories’, Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981), 273–82 and Robert Tittler, Portraits, Painters and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), especially Chapter 3. 32 Gerhold, London Plotted, p. 24. 33 TNA, SP 12/125/28, PROB 11/64/161, and CP 40/1120/1544; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 189–90; LGL, MS. CLC/PA/G/012/MS05670 /16. 34 Schofield, Medieval London Houses, pp. 71–4; Gerhold, London Plotted, p. 24.

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actual production, storage, or much else, though its location at the intersection of Cheapside and Wood Street would have been ideal for attracting retail trade. The grandest shops of all in pre-Civil War and pre-Fire London will surely have been Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange, opened in 1566, followed by Robert Cecil’s New Exchange in 1609, and the grand frontages which marked Goldsmith’s Row along Cheapside. But even booths at the Royal Exchange came in at a mere seven and a half by five feet, making them largely unsuitable for much beyond display and sale.35 All these spaces, large and small alike, were combining to make London one of the greater commercial centres of the Western World: a city in which retail shops lined almost every major street, and in which an enormous variety of consumer goods could be viewed on public display. Among them, though not in as much profusion as one might expect, were painted works of various sorts. Even before Peake’s time, myriad painters came to engage in that retail trade. Writing in the late 1560s, the young Oxford drop-out and music tutor Thomas Whythorne (1528–96) recalled walking past a painter’s shop in 1549, engaging with the proprietor/painter, and purchasing from him a painting of a woman playing a lute. Very likely he took the same opportunity to commission the painter to do a portrait of himself: one of four which Whythorne commissioned during his lifetime.36 It is difficult to know how many painters will have engaged in such retail activity. Much of the painter’s work still came by commission, and so required no dedicated space for display and sales of completed work. But painters working in several genres do seem to have maintained space for such commercial activities. Portraits of the sort which attracted Whythorne, perhaps samples of commercial signs, and perhaps especially coats of arms (whether licit or illicit!) counted amongst them. By at least the mid-Elizabethan years, and at least in London, many painters openly displayed coats of arms for sale in their stalls and shops. By that time it appears that just about anyone with the means to do so could walk into a painter’s shop and commission a coat of arms (to which he or she may or may not have been entitled!) or pick the components thereof off the peg and have them made up. People the realm over bought the arms of royalty or senior aristocrats as badges of personal affinity, along with the arms to which they themselves were entitled or which social pretence led them to claim as their own.37 At least 35

Ann Saunders (ed.), The Royal Exchange, London Topographical Society, 152 (1997), p. 89. James M. Osborne (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961), p. 20. 37 Anthony Wagner and George Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, in Tribute to an Antiquary: Essays Presented to Marc Fitch by some of his Friends, ed. Frederick Emmison and Roy Stephens (1976), pp. 235–6. The practice was highlighted again in the protracted court case brought by the Garter King of Arms against the Painter-Stainers’ Company in the Court of Chivalry between 1634 and 1637, and seems to have been common knowledge by that time. See, e.g., proceedings of 1634 in Richard Cust and Andrew Hopper (eds), Court of Chivalry: www.courtof-chivalry.bham.ac.uk, no. 348, King of Arms v. Painters and Stainers Company, pp. 150–1. 36

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in London, some of the more enterprising master painters marketed their wares openly and without apparent regulation. The herald William Smith, Rouge Dragon between 1597 and 1618 and something of a crusader in his time, attested to this when he described a man named Leigh who went to a painter’s shop on London’s Silver Street to commission a coat of arms. The painter, whom Smith failed to identify, obviously took on a lot of such work.38 Silver Street, within city walls in the northwest corner of the city, was no obscure location. Leigh’s social knowledge of the city allowed him to know where to find it. When he arrived at the shop door the painter is said to have offered him a selection of sixteen patterns from which to choose. In the end the unnamed painter scrambled the patron’s selection into a single escutcheon.39 An early seventeenth-century list of London arms painters who ‘… kepte open shops and shows of arms according to the Custom of London and … [were] never questind nor for byden by any athourty …’ included no fewer than twenty-four names.40 Amongst them were some of the more obscure PainterStainers of the day, but also some of the most prominent. The latter included the very enterprising Robert Greenwood, Richard Scarlett, Samuel Thompson, Ralph Treswell, both Robert and Richard Kimby, and William Winchell, along with both York and Somerset Heralds.41 The Painter-Stainers on the list, whom we have met before, were amongst the most eminent and successful arms painters of their time, most of them serving at one time or another as master of the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London. The heralds, presumably Ralph Brooke and Sir William Segar, obviously senior figures in the College of Arms, also ranked amongst the most successful and prominent heralds and arms painters of the same time. All of them were experienced producers of the whole range of heraldic trappings and accoutrements, which they provided for livery companies, schools, and colleges, for civic and royal officials, and of course for the weddings, funerals, and residential premises of myriad armigerous clients. These are the sort of names we might well expect. They probably typify other prominent painters who kept retail shops as well. The greater surprise comes in the names of the more obscure figures on the list, about whom, in most cases, 38

Perhaps it was the same Arthur Cutler who held a shop on that street between 1583 and 1595 and who was one of the leading Painter-Stainers of his time. See above, p. 163, and Tittler, EMBP, vide Cutler, Arthur. 39 Anthony Wagner, Heralds of England (1967), p. 237. 40 National Library of Scotland, MS GB233/Adv.MS.31.4.6, fol. 88v. The date is approximate, and internal biographical evidence suggests that not all those named were keeping shops at precisely the same time. The document appears to have been drawn up as evidence by one side or the other in the contemporary dispute between the Painter-Stainers’ Company of London and the College of Arms over the right to paint arms. The document, and the subject, is discussed at greater length in Robert Tittler, ‘Paintings off the Peg: The Retail Sale of Painting in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies 60: 4 (October, 2021), 919–40. 41 They will have been Ralph Brooke, who served 1593–1625, and Sir William Segar, who held the office between 1589 and 1597.

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little or nothing else is known. Their presence in the list of painters selling at retail would suggest a practice pursued by more than the prominent master painters of the day. Then, too, the fact that some of those listed appear to have been related to painters without being painters themselves, suggests that some were family members employed simply as shopkeepers. We can assume that such shops did as Leigh’s painter did, which was to have samples of their work on hand to show the enquiring client what he or she could purchase. Given the prominence of at least some of these figures, and with the possible exception of the slippery figure of Robert Kimby,42 there is no reason to think that they were necessarily engaged in producing illicit arms. By the 1630s the practice whereby painters, and especially arms painters, kept retail shops was so widespread that the eminently successful Painter-Stainer and herald Henry Lilly not only freely admitted (as we’ve seen in Chapter 5) that he ‘… kept a shop of paintings’, and ‘wold do such paintynge work as was brought to him to do and wold not lose the custom of his shop’, but he waxed indignant that anyone should object to the practice.43 Along with its affirmation of how common the practice had become, his statement clearly indicates a shop which was both workplace and retail salesroom. Whilst some painters retailed their wares even in the Royal Exchange,44 myriad lesser painters displayed their works even without the benefit of a shop. Hoping to catch the stroller’s eye, they simply hung them up on the walls along the Strand, just as they have done along Bayswater Road atop Hyde Park in recent times.45 Some such displays appear to have been mounted by less talented painters, not necessarily members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company, as a means of attracting a trade which their reputations alone could not reach. These paintings were subject to the scrutiny of the Company search, carried out weekly

42

Kimby had been flagged in 1622 by the Painter-Stainers for illicit painting, and was the key defendant in a suit brought in 1634 by the King of Arms against the Painter-Stainers in the Court of Chivalry. LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/39 (Painter-Stainers’ Company Court Minute Book, 1623–1649); Cust and Hopper, ‘Court of Chivalry’ website: www.court-of-chivalry.bham.ac.uk, no. 348, King of Arms v. Painters and Stainers Company; College of Arms, ‘Painters’ Workbook, 1619–1634’, fols 17r, 17v, 19v, 21v, 22v, and 29r; LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001. 43 Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS 836, fol. 619, as cited in Thomas Woodcock, ‘Henry Lilly’, ODNB. Lilly, who was admitted as an orphan to Christ’s Hospital in 1595 at age six, became one of the few Painter-Stainers of his time who also enjoyed an official standing in the College of Arms, serving as Rouge Croix Pursuivant in 1634, and Rouge Dragon from 1638. 44 These will have included Robert Adams, George Carleton the elder, John Potkyn, Ralph Robinson, Christopher Smithson, and Edmund Stedman; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 26, 52, 158, 162, 170, and LMA, MS DL/AL/C/001/MS09050/006/88v. 45 Described by the aptly named poet William Painter: ‘You curious painters/ and you limners all, from Temple Barre/ along to Charing Cross/ that your gay pictures/ hang out on the wall’; William Painter, Chaucer Newly Painted (1623 edition, STC no. 19125–5), Prologue, unpaginated.

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into at least the 1630s to detect shoddy work, and their painters were fined if any were found to be poorly done.46 The Company showed the same concern for the retail sale of paintings by those neither members nor licensed by the Company. A search of 1632 led to a fine for a London bookseller named Sherman, who had no claim to Company membership, for doing just that.47 By approving the sale of paintings by Painter-Stainers, so long as they met certain standards of quality, the Company effectively supported the extension of their members’ activities into the retail sector. The concept of the workshop, if not necessarily its actual physical presence, could thus extend to retail space. By opposing the sale of paintings by others, the Painter-Stainers were challenging that emergence of middlemen to their trade which had already become a salient feature of other aspects of the early modern economy.48 The dealer in ‘fine arts’ who had no role in production would eventually become a well-established presence in London and some larger provincial centres. But prior to 1640 such an enterprise appears to have been vigorously and, at least in London, sometimes successfully challenged by the painters themselves. London had no lock on such retail activities. Retail shops had existed in provincial towns for many years, and the practice had come to include the sale of arms as well.49 When, as part of the crackdown on illicit arms painting of that year, William Le Neve was appointed Deputy Herald for Norfolk and Suffolk in 1618 he was specifically empowered to restrict the kinds of arms which the tradesmen of Norwich could sell in their shops.50 Whether or not these shops were run by painters, or were physical extensions of painters’ workspaces and tended by others, remains uncertain. But by that time the retail sale of arms, perhaps along with genre paintings and portraits, was proceeding apace in both metropolitan and at least the larger provincial centres. At least some painters were extending their energies to sell them. Along with those painters who worked out of workshops of one sort or another in towns and cities, some few will have been given residence and working facilities for months or even years at a time in the country estates of the nobility and 46 The

practice will almost certainly have been carried out in earlier years for which Company records have not survived. LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/73 47 LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/73. 48 F.J. Fisher, ‘London as an Engine of Economic Growth’, repr. in London and the English Economy, 1500–1700, ed. P.J. Corfield and N.B. Harte (1990), pp. 173–84, especially pp. 177–9. 49 Derek Keene, ‘Sites of Desire: Shops, Selds, and Wardrobes in London and Other English Cities, 1100–1500’, in Buyers and Sellers, Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Brno Blondé, Peter Stabel, Jon Stobart, and Ilja van Demme (Turnhout, 2006), pp. 127–30. 50 Wagner and Squibb, ‘Deputy Heralds’, 235.

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landed gentry. Such offers enabled an affluent and sophisticated patron – an earl of Leicester, or of Arundel, or the King or Queen – to bring a continental painter directly to England without him or her having to worry about finding his or her own keep. As has been noted in the discussion of stranger-painters above, men like Lucas de Heere, Hubert Beuckelaer, John (‘Jehan’) Balechouse, and Hendrick de Keyser may have stayed on with their aristocratic hosts for months or even years at a time, and been provided with dedicated places of work and residence for their own use.51 The practice also extended to leading decorative painters like Rowland Buckett, who carried out commissions far and wide, and who spent considerable time in places like Hatfield or Knole in order to do so. They will have had to receive workspace for the duration of their employment away from London. As these extensive commissions required setting many hands to the tasks at hand, that space must have been extensive. In 1633/4 the Lichfield-based Samuel Kyrke (fl.c. 1594–mid-1650s) carried out extensive decorative painting twenty-five miles away at Sir Richard Leveson’s new house at Trentham Hall. That work included Lady Leigh’s chamber, the dining room and the stairs and, a few months later, heraldic devices in the parlour and atop the stairs. Leveson gave Kyrke a locked apartment over the coach house to use as a temporary residence and workshop during that time.52 While they took on such work away from their usual haunts, painters like Buckett and Kyrke will nevertheless have maintained a principal workshop in their home city or town to which they eventually returned. In Buckett’s case, and as his career blossomed over the years, that workshop moved to ever larger premises, from unfashionable Southwark westward to St Martin’s Lane in 1611 and thence to Aldersgate Street by 1626.53 In their absence, journeymen and others will have kept that home shop going: perhaps producing pieces to be installed on site, perhaps working on other commissions entirely. Long-term residence may also have been offered by well-heeled patrons who dwelt in some of the more remote corners of the realm where few suitable artisans might be found. It is doubtful that Gervase Holles kept his portrait painter on hand for more than a few days, as he seems to have commissioned but a single work.54 But William, third earl of Worcester, retained such a painter over a long period of time in his Monmouthshire household at Raglan Castle, setting him to work both to paint à nouveau and to copy other paintings. Though we don’t know the painter’s name, Worcester wrote in 1584 to his friend John Scudamore of Holme Lacey in Shropshire that he had ‘…a very sufficient workeman here with me. Wherefore if yo wilbe soe good as to sende mee the 51

See above, pp. 38–9. Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 288; Malcolm Airs, ‘Samuel and Zachery Kyrke, Painters of Lichfield’, Transactions of the Ancient Monument Society, 60 (2016), 75–9; William Salt Library, MS M848. 53 Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 46. 54 See above, pp. 90–1. 52

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picture rowled upp by this bearer I will cause my mann to Drawe ytt’. As an afterthought, he noted that ‘… yf yor comynge … my Paynter shall drae you allso’.55 Worcester was not the only remotely situated patron who hosted a painter. Lord William Howard’s seat at Naworth Castle in Cumberland was as remote from any urban centre as Worcester’s Raglan Castle. He, too, appreciated the services of a convenient painter, and succeeded in enticing not one but two in the 1620s and 1630s: Henry Heskett (fl.1620s) 56 and then Charles Barker (fl.1629–33).57 No other painter of this era enjoyed the lavish provision of dedicated spaces provided by Charles I to Anthony Van Dyck. Along with Rubens, Van Dyck was clearly the most eminent and celebrated painter working in Caroline England: a veritable jewel in the court scene, and one whose extended presence Charles made every effort to retain. Van Dyck probably had more skilled hands under his command than any other easel painter of his time. Though it remains difficult to work out the names of his assistants or of secondary painters employed in his shop, there seem to have been lots of them, each skilled in some aspect of portrait production and some whom he may have brought with him from abroad.58 All of them required workspace. As we’ve seen, Van Dyck’s ‘shop’ (not to be confused with the residential space he enjoyed at Eltham Palace) included a house and garden at the water’s edge at Blackfriars, courtesy of the King. Charles so enjoyed watching Van Dyck work that, in 1635, he ordered a new causeway and stairs to be built there better to accommodate the royal barge which brought him there for visits.59 The working space of painters in these years gradually developed in step with the expansion of the trade itself, and of the consumer activity on which it depended. While many, perhaps most, painters inhabited whatever workspace they could afford and were happy to have it contiguous with their households, the rise to prominence of some particular painters, with their myriad assistants and secondary painters, called for the emergence of larger workshops with expanded working space. The mid-Tudor blossoming of a public for portraiture, heraldic 55 William,

third earl of Worcester, to John Scudamore, 6 November, 1584, TNA, C.115/100/7373. The technique in sending such a painting on canvas was to take it out of its frame and carefully roll it around some cylindrical shape for transport. To ‘draw’, or ‘drae’ in this case, was a common contemporary synonym for the act of painting. 56 George Ornsby (ed.), Selections from the Household Books of the Lord William Howard of Naworth Castle, Surtees Society, 68 (Durham, 1877), p. 182; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary, p. 248; Ellis Waterhouse, The Dictionary of 16th and 17th Century British Painters, 3rd edn (Woodbridge, 1988), p. 121. 57 Barker was steadily employed at Naworth between 1629 and 1633 and, though he had some base in Newcastle as well, he appears to have resided with Howard at Naworth during that time. Ornsby, Selections from the Household Books, pp. 269, 270–1; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary, p. 85. 58 Karen Hearn, ‘Van Dyck’s London Studio’, in Hearn, Van Dyck and Britain (2009), p. 153. 59 ODNB, vide Van Dyck, Anthony.

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display, and various forms of decorative painting also required the development of more specialized workspaces devoted to particular sectors of the occupation. Aristocratic patrons, typically engaged in the conversion or construction of post-Reformation country estates, came to demand long galleries and other dedicated spaces for the display of visual imagery. While panel paintings could be produced off-site in established workshops, larger painting programmes, either in the great country homes or in some Laudian era churches, often required on-site workspaces where painters could produce the required imagery over the course of weeks, months, or even years. At the same time, a burgeoning public of more modest pretensions indulged in the purchase especially of portraiture and arms painting. At least in London, such a clientele prompted the expansion of the painter’s workspace to include a retail element, either contiguous with the shop floor or apart from it, where samples of painted work or actual paintings could be commissioned or even purchased off the peg. Over the course of time such spaces would come to be found in provincial centres as well.

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9 The Business of Painting Whether before the Reformation or after, stranger-painters and painter-stainers, provincially based painters and London-based painters, picture painters, glass painters, and arms painters all painted for a living. But what sort of a living did they make, and how did they make it? The answer to the first question depended on a variety of factors: where they stood in the occupational hierarchy; how well they managed their business; and what arrangements pertained for undertaking their work. As the preceding chapters have helped to explain, they also depended on the contextual circumstances of the day: on wider issues of politics and society, foreign and domestic policy, and on religious and social factors. In the Tudor and early Stuart era, the clientele for painted work changed continually and rapidly. As we’ve seen, the opening years of the Tudor age found English portraiture in the form of easel painting barely in its infancy, glass painting and manuscript illumination well supported, decorative painting (especially in ecclesiastical establishments) in constant and high demand, and arms painting increasingly popular. Over the ensuing decades glass painting, which had featured largely in ecclesiastical settings, almost disappeared save for heraldic imagery before springing back to life in early Stuart times, peaking with Archbishop Laud’s call for ‘the beauty of holiness’. A public for panel portraiture grew steadily in both absolute numbers and social range. That for arms painting reached unprecedented intensity throughout the Elizabethan era and into the next century. For many painters, the rapidity of change, much of it transpiring over the single lifetime of an individual painter or workshop, favoured versatility over specialization. Concentration on a single genre may have become more common over time and amongst painters in the larger urban centres than in rural areas, but it was still a work in progress. In the eighteenth century, for example, the demands of the market allowed portrait painters, known as picturemakers, picture-painters, or simply ‘artists’, to specialize almost exclusively in that medium. By that time, painter-stainers had almost exclusively become decorative painters, and rarely took on portraiture, so that the division between the two had become essentially complete. But even in the early seventeenth century such a bifurcation remained tentative. The concept of the ‘artist’ to describe a category of painters was only then emerging in court circles. There is some irony in the observation that, while most of the great court portrait painters throughout the era were those strangers schooled in continental workshops, it is also they who, at least through the Elizabethan years, were likely to have been even more versatile than their native English 204

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counterparts. Holbein probably offers the best example, as his continental training enabled him to paint, draw, and design just about anything he was asked to do. But he was far from unique in that regard. Almost no one measured up to his skill, but at least some others shared his versatility. The Emden-born Martin van Bentham (d.1619) for example, painted a portrait of Prince Charles (1608) and two more of unknown subjects for Anne of Denmark in 1610 or 1611 for which he received £18. As Van Bentham is described as a limner in the payment for the latter works, they may have been miniatures. But in addition, he did decorative painting for the duke of York; produced designs for stained glass and other painting work at Hatfield and also decorative or figurative painting for Prince Henry at St James’s Palace in 1612.1 Myriad other stranger-painters through these years had been trained in a similar variety of media, and could work accordingly. Many English painters best known for one medium could still be involved in others. We have seen how arms painters like Richard Scarlett and Randle Holme the elder also tried their hand at portraiture when the opportunity arose, though not with much success.2 Some of those painters primarily known for portraiture were still active members of the Painter-Stainers’ Company or other London liveries. When, as we’ve seen,3 in 1627, a group of ‘picturemakers’ asked the Painter-Stainers to assist them in their opposition to ‘certain strangers using the art of painting’, they enlisted the help of portrait-painters like the Painter-Stainer George Cottington. Company minutes note that some others of the petitioning picture-makers were themselves members of that and other liveries.4 The occupational divisions of that time were more pronounced between stranger- and native English painters, or between the licensed and unlicensed, than between painter-stainers and picture-makers. In this and other ways, the business of painting for a living in early modern England remains a complex issue. Our ability to describe it suffers from an 1

Van Bentham or Bentheim came to London in or about 1595, received a patent of denization in May 1607, and was commissioned by patrons in and around the court circle until his death in 1619. R.E.G. Kirk and Ernest F. Kirk (eds), Return of Aliens Dwelling in the City and Suburbs of London (4 vols, Aberdeen, 1900–8), III, pp. 46, 160, 176–7; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 96. 2 Adrian Ailes and Robert Tittler, ‘Arms Painting and the Life of “Sir Henry Unton”’, British Art Journal, 20:3 (2019), 12–21; Robert Tittler and Shaun Evans, ‘Randle Holme the Elder and the Development of Portraiture in North Wales, c.1600–1630’, British Art Journal, 16:2 (Autumn, 2015), 22–7. 3 See above, p. 83. 4 Along with others unnamed, petitioners included ‘Mr Peake’ (probably William, son of Robert Peake the elder) and Richard Greenbury. The Company initially supported the petitioners, but eventually required those who were not Painter-Stainers to join the Company, which they then did. LGL, Painter-Stainers’ Court Minute Book, 1623–49, MS CLC/L/ PA/B/001/MS05667/001, pp. 28–9, 69, 82.

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absence of some of the key sources to illuminate the subject for continentally based painters. Much of the material evidence has naturally disappeared over time, but even more critical is the relative scarcity especially of archival sources like post mortem inventories, written contracts, records of sale, and receipts for payment, all of which survive in greater abundance in some continental rather than English archives.5 As John Evelyn emphatically noted in his trip to the Netherlands in 1641, continental painters also worked in a much larger and more highly developed retail market for easel paintings, including dedicated sales rooms and even auctions, than their English counterparts.6 That market, the commercial side of the Dutch Golden Age, had boomed with unprecedented intensity from the 1590s, and continued to do so into the middle of the following century.7 Nothing like it developed in England for a long time to come. The value of a painting depended on such virtually universal variables as the size of the work, the number and complexity of subject matter, its physical condition, and what the market would bear. But in many continental markets it depended as well on criteria which had yet fully to apply to the English scene. Guido Mancini, writing c.1617–20, linked a painting’s value in part to its provenance, to the ‘quality’ of the patrons who owned it, and to the reputation of the painter.8 Those criteria assume a culture of collecting which would record provenance, as well as a culture of artistic celebrity which would have identified authorship to begin with. Save for the activities of some members of the early Stuart court circle, none of those characteristics were yet to be found in the English scene of that era. English painters were much slower than their continental counterparts to begin signing their work, which made it more difficult to

5

See, for example, Michelle O’Malley, The Business of Art: Contracts and the Commissioning Process in Renaissance Italy (New Haven and London, 2005) and Patrizia Cavazzini, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth Century Rome (University Park, Pennsylvania, 2008), and Maarten Prak, ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Art Market During the Dutch Golden Age’, in S.R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (eds), Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800 (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 143–71. Though they deal with the eighteenth century, essays in Neil De Marchi and Sophie Raux (eds), Moving Pictures: Intra-European Trade in Images, 16th–18th Centuries (Turnhout, 2014), and especially the Introduction and pp. 37–76, are also highly suggestive. 6 E.S. de Beer (ed.), The Diary of John Evelyn, selected and edited by Roy Strong (1959, 2006), pp. 25–6. 7 Prak, ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Art Market During the Dutch Golden Age’, and Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 548–52, 555–64. Strictly speaking, the Dutch Golden Age extended from the 1590s to c.1645, with an interruption occasioned by the Twelve Years’ War, 1609–21. 8 Guido Mancini, Considerazioni sulla pittura …, ed. A. Mancini and L. Salerno (Rome, 1956–7), as cited in Eric Jan Sluijter, ‘Determining Value on the Art Market in the Golden Age’, in Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere (eds), Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and their Contemporaries (Amsterdam, 2008), pp. 7–8.

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collect the works of particular painters.9 Whilst a number of English painters of the Elizabethan and early Stuart era were highly regarded and well patronized, few besides Hilliard and perhaps William Segar – whose fame warranted a contemporary portrait – were widely celebrated in their lifetimes.10 Such continental markets will also have left a much fuller and more copious paper trail to be pursued in modern times than exists for the sale and resale of paintings in Tudor and early Stuart times. Without such sources, and usually without the ability to tell the size, quality, and appearance of those many paintings which are noted but no longer extant, we can only approximate the economic side of the occupation. Notwithstanding these daunting challenges, we may still draw some broad observations. To begin with, it is perhaps needless to say that the kind of living a painter made will also have varied enormously from the very considerable to the utterly meagre, and that neither popularity nor reputation necessarily brought financial success. Few painters of their time brought greater skill to their work, enjoyed greater acclaim in their lifetimes, or had a more storied reputation than the Queen’s Limner Nicholas Hilliard. And yet we learn that he managed his resources badly, remained in straitened circumstances for much of his career, nearly lost the lease on his Gutter Lane workshop for failure to pay his rent, and continually required highly placed friends to bail him out.11 When Hilliard noted that the gifted London painter John Bossom (fl.1588–1619) was so poor that he could only afford to paint in black and white, he may well have had forebodings of his own proximity to penury.12 Hilliard was not unique in the ineffective management of resources. Holbein himself died in debt,13 and the great decorative painter and contractor Rowland Buckett did as well.14 Buckett’s contemporary William Robinson (d.1635/6), Newcastle’s most successful and well patronized painter and herald painter over a long career, left an estate of only £10.15 9

I am most grateful to Karen Hearn for affirming this suggestion. I am most grateful to Elizabeth Goldring for these insights. Hilliard, for example, was celebrated in John Donne’s poem ‘The Storme’, in which he noted that ‘…a hand, or eye By Hilliard drawn, is worth an history…’. As described in Chapter 5, Segar had a distinguished career not only as a painter, but also as a herald and diplomat. It was these activities more than his painting which earned him a coat of arms (1612) and a knighthood (1616), though those distinctions will perhaps have contributed to the value of his paintings. ODNB, vide Segar, Sir William. 11 Elizabeth Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard: Life of an Artist (London and New Haven, 2019), pp. 239–41. 12 Nicholas Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning, ed. R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain (1981), pp. 67–8. 13 Susan Foister, Holbein and England (London and New Haven, 2004), p. 14. 14 Will of Rowland Buckett, TNA, PROB 11/181/368. 15 Along with the usual household items, Robinson’s inventory included six books of arms on which he will have relied for patterns in his capacity as Deputy to the Office of Arms, one bible, and two stones for grinding colours. His funeral expenses came to a very meagre 26s. 10

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The most securely supported painters, if not necessarily the most monetarily successful, were those enjoying an annuity from the Crown or other well-heeled patron. As we’ve seen, his drive to secure his reputation as a European monarch of cultural refinement led Henry VIII to make particularly good use of annuities to secure the services of admired continental painters. Amongst a host of others, men like Antonio Toto of Florence,16 Vincent Volpe of Naples,17 Niccolo Bellini of Modena,18 the northerners Lucas Horenbout,19 Guillem Scrots,20 and of course Hans Holbein became the most obvious beneficiaries of Henry’s largesse, bringing with them a desperately needed patina of refinement to his court.21 Elizabeth continued to welcome stranger-painters at court, but by her time some native English painters, men like Hilliard, George Gower, and Robert Peake, could also be called upon to provide the required skills. The more cosmopolitan Stuarts again looked abroad, snagging the likes of Cornelius Johnson (born in England of immigrant parents but foreign-trained), and Daniel Mytens in James’s reign and aggressively recruiting talented continental painters like Gerrit van Honthorst, Rubens, and Van Dyck in Charles’s. Ecclesiastical authorities or well-heeled aristocrats also offered annuities to secure the services of particular painters. Their enticements often extended to payments in kind which might consist of workspace, residence, board, or other perks. In receiving some such boons from Robert Sherborne, bishop of Chichester, Lambert Barnard the elder (c.1490s–1567/8) was but one of the best-known painters tied to such long-term arrangements.22 As we’ve seen, John or Jehan Balechous long served the Cavendish household,23 and the Dutch 8d. Durham University Library Archives, MS. DPR I/1/1636/R9 2; Tyne and Wear Archives Service microfilm 1273/7, fols 1r, 9v, 10r, 41v, 43r. 16 Erna Auerbach, Tudor Artists: A Study of Painters in the Royal Service and of Portraiture on Illuminated Documents from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of Elizabeth I (1954), p. 145. 17 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, pp. 8, 190; Auerbach, ‘Vincent Volpe, King’s Painter’, Burlington Magazine, 92:569 (Aug., 1950), 222–7; H.M. Colvin et al., The History of the King’s Works (7 vols, 1963–82), IV, pp. 102, 418, 732. 18 Martin Biddle, ‘Nicholas Bellin of Modena: An Italian Artificer at the Court of Francis I and Henry VIII’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series, 29 (1966), 106–21; Auerbach, Tudor Artists, pp. 177–8; Edward Town (ed.), ‘A Biographical Dictionary of London Painters, 1547–1625’, The Walpole Society, 76 (2014), p. 143. 19 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 171; ODNB, vide Horenbout, Lucas. 20 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 187; ODNB, vide Scrots, Guillem. 21 Foister, Holbein and England, p. 22. 22 ODNB, vide Barnard, Lambert; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, p. 86. 23 Malcolm Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History (Stroud, Gloucestershire, 1995, 1998), pp. 71, 157; Basil Stallybrass, ‘Bess of Hardwick’s Buildings and Building Accounts’, Archaeologia, 2nd series, 64 (1913), 398; N. Durant and P. Riden (eds), The Building of Hardwick Hall, I. The Old Hall, 1587–91, Derbyshire Record Society, 4 (1980), p. xxvi and Ibid., II, The New Hall, 1591–98, IX (1984), pp. lxviii–lxx; Philip Riden (ed.), The Household Accounts of Willliam Cavendish, Lord Cavendish of Hardwick, 1597–1607, Derbyshire Record Society, 41 (2016), pp. 38, n. 6, and 182.

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painter Hendrick de Keyser (1613–65) similarly served Henry Clifford, 5th earl of Cumberland, between 1631 and 1638.24 As with the office of Sergeant Painter, an annuity guaranteed the security of a regular income in return for work at the patron’s command, but it left the recipient free to take on other work as time permitted. Holbein’s output for the Crown, which his £30 annuity obligated him to produce, remains legion. But as a proportion of his total income, the work he produced for private patrons – English aristocrats and German merchants of the Steelyard – probably brought him as much again.25 Whether one received an annuity or not, by the early Stuart years painters with the largest gross incomes will have been the small group of top-end and mostly foreign-born portrait painters favoured at court, those decorative or figurative painters like Buckett who came to serve essentially as contractors, or that handful of licensed arms painters who could turn out funeral trappings at the rate of several a month. The presence of favoured court painters pertained throughout the entire era at hand, even beginning with Henry VII’s support for men like Maynard Vewick. But the worth of such painters rose over the course of time with the emergence in England of the portrait medium in particular. Initially valued largely to facilitate the exchange of diplomatic gifts or the creation of regal images, portraiture became a more widely pursued object of conspicuous consumption and the prestige attached to its possession and display counted ever more substantially. In that long-term development, the value of the object began gradually to accrue to the reputation of its maker. By the late Elizabethan era and especially under the early Stuarts, some of the more affluent and refined collectors came to pay for the brand as well as the product, conferring additional celebrity as they did so. When, in 1618, Lucy Russell, countess of Bedford, wrote in a breathless frenzy to the daughter-in-law of the dying Sir Nathanial Bacon of her lust to acquire any Holbeins from Bacon’s estate, the notion of the celebrity painter, indeed, of the artist, had at last arrived, at least in the courtly circles in which the countess moved. One can almost hear her panting as she wrote that she had heard …that your father-in-law was like to die but that he had some pieces of painting of Holbein’s which I am sure as soon as Arundel hears he [will] try all means to get, but I beseech you entreat Mr. Bacon … to lay hold of them beforehand for me … for I am a very diligent gatherer of all I can get of Holbein or any other excellent Master’s hand. I do not care at what rate I have them for price 24

ODNB, vide Clifford, Henry. Holbein and England, pp. 13, 22–3, 299–301.

25 Foister,

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… and when Mr. Bacon come to London he shall see that though I be but a late beginner I have a pretty store of choice pieces … and be not curious to think I may pay too much, for I had rather have them than jewels.26

By the time Holbein probably came to her attention – seventy-five years after his death – he had already garnered his first biography, by Karl van Mander in 1604, and his posthumous reputation only grew with time.27 That recognition accorded Holbein and others in the early Stuart court marked the growing division between paintings valued for their subject matter – which seem to have held little interest for the countess of Bedford – and those valued for their authorship. A small group of elite court painters, almost all foreign-born or at lest foreign-trained, had come to command commissions and prices based on their fame as well as their skill. Holbein’s status continued to grow after his death, but Mytens, Johnson, Rubens, and Van Dyck gained their due while still alive. The same might finally have been said for native English painters like Hilliard (who had also benefitted by foreign training), Segar, Gower, and Peake. The fame of the strangers amongst these top-end painters long preceded their arrival in England, making their very presence a highly valued commodity at court. Some of the pace with which this celebrity unfolded may be measured in the distance between Hilliard’s need to borrow from friends to pay his rent and avoid debtor’s prison28 and the lavish quarters at Blackfriars provided by Charles I to Van Dyck less than a generation later. At least from the early seventeenth century prices for the work of these celebrity painters rose sharply, driven by rapacious collectors like the countess of Bedford who appear to have cared not about price at all. Daniel Mytens topped up his annuity from Charles I with a payment of £120 in 1626 for producing a copy of Titian’s masterpiece Venus and sundry other works, though his ability to command such commissions waned once Rubens and then Van Dyck appeared on the scene. After returning in frustration to the Netherlands, Mytens still managed to recoup in 1633 the sum of £405 for several paintings commissioned in 1627.29 In the end, Van Dyck topped even that. When he set up shop on his second trip to London in 1632, he organized what seems a virtual assembly line for the production of portraits. In addition to his annuity of £200, Van Dyck 26

Audley End Archives, Essex Record Office MS D/DBy C19, as cited in A.C. Edwards (ed.), English History from Essex Sources (Chelmsford, 1952), pp. 34–5. 27 ODNB, vide Holbein, Hans the Younger. 28 Goldring, Nicholas Hilliard, pp. 239–41. 29 ‘Two “half paintings” of Charles I and the Queen to be sent to the queen of Bohemia @ £40, a portrait of “Jeffrey a dwarf in the wilderness” [i.e., Jeffrey Hudson] for the same sum, two portraits of the King en large at £105 to be delivered to the Lord Chamberlain and the bishop of London, and two paintings of the King to be given to Thomas Cary and Viscount Dorchester for £180.’ Frederick Devon (ed.), Issues out of the Exchequer in the Reign of James I (1836), pp. 355–6, 358. See also ODNB, vide Mytens, Daniel; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, p. 341; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 146–7.

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regularly charged £50 to £60 for a full-length portrait, £30 for a half-length, and £20 for a mere head and shoulders. In these sessions he rapidly sketched the head and general outline of the rest of the figure from life, painted the head himself, and had his assistants – often skilled painters like Jan van Belcamp (1610–53), Remigius van Leemput (1607–75), and George Geldorp – fill in the rest from stand-ins modelling the drapery. For composite portraits, those with more than one figure, he will have commanded even more. According to a privy seal warrant of 7 May 1633 he received from the Crown the enormous sum of £444 for ‘nine pictures of or Royall self and most dearest Consort the Queene’.30 Along with the provision of lavish workshop space which alleviated some of his overhead costs, he and but one or two others were remunerated at a higher level than any other painter of the era, and celebrated accordingly.31 Even Gerrit van Honthorst, less familiar to us but almost equally valued in his brief stint at the Caroline court, could command enormous sums from the Crown. Though he failed to receive the knighthood which Charles bestowed on Rubens and Van Dyck, he received an annuity of £100 in 1628, an additional £450 for what appears to be several pictures in that same year, and a further £210 in the following year for a single work, Seladon and Astraea.32 By contrast to the fame and fortunes secured by these few, the paintings produced by the vast majority of painters in London or elsewhere continued in these years to be valued primarily for their subject matter. Their authorship generally remained unknown save perhaps to the initial purchaser. The vast majority of works remained unsigned. On the infrequent occasions when paintings are mentioned in surviving inventories post mortem, the painter (often unknown even by that time) was even less frequently noted. Slightly lesser court painters of the early seventeenth century, those whose competence gained them ample patronage but fell short of real celebration, still turned out panel portraits of presentation quality for well under £10 apiece. In 1606 the Sergeant Painter Jan de Critz received £53 6s. 8d. for three large full-lengths, of James I, Anne of Denmark, and Prince Charles, for presentation to the archduke of Austria.33 But in the following year he commanded only £4 apiece for four threequarter-length gift portraits for Robert Cecil. Most of his other known portraits, even for court figures, went for around £5 each. Even after he gained the office of Sergeant-Painter some contemporaries thought of him as a painter of ships which, indeed, he additionally was.34 30

ODNB, vide Van Dyck, Anthony. Ibid. 32 Michele Lynn Frederick, ‘Shaping the Royal Image; Gerrit van Honthorst and the Stuart Courts in London and the Hague, 1620–1649’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Delaware, 2019), pp. 324–5. I am grateful to Dr Frederick for permission to consult this thesis. 33 Devon, Issues out of the Exchequer, p. 46. 34 ODNB, vide de Critz, John the elder; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, especially p. 67; Roy Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture, (1969), p. 49. 31

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The Painter-Stainer George Cottington lingered on the outer edges of the court circle and received £30 for a portrait of the Spanish Infanta in 1623. But three years later he was only able to command £25 for all five full-length paintings of the Dering family of Surrenden Dering: of the minor courtier Sir Edward Dering, his first and second wives, his brother Henry, and his son, Edward the younger. For another £7 5s. he did two more portraits, of Sir Edward’s father and grandson.35 Given the contemporary rate of inflation, which has been calculated at some 300 per cent between c. 1550 and c. 1600,36 this is less in terms of real value – value as adjusted for inflation – than, for example, the £5 for a full-length and £1 for a head only which the well-known Dutchman Cornelius Ketel charged for portraits half a century earlier.37 Despite the prominence of his clients, Cottington left little footprint on his times and had remained largely unknown to modern scholarship until 2009. In sum, and save for the lofty prices commanded at court by the elite few, the cost of most portraits measured in real value terms failed to advance, and may even have declined, over these years. Competent original portraits or good copies could still be had on the cheap: £1 a picture, repeated in payments by the 9th earl of Northumberland and others,38 seems the standard price for the painting sets – often only of heads – which became a common feature of the late Elizabethan country house (see Fig. 14 for an example).39 In furnishing Hardwick Hall in 1599 Lord Cavendish paid a total of £2 5s. for six portraits of heroic figures (Edward III, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Wolsey, and Bishop Gardiner), another 12s. for ‘12 painted heads’, thought to be of Roman emperors, 29s. for sixteen painted pictures ‘in tables’ (i.e., framed), and 13s. 4d. for a picture of the Queen.40 Five years later he dug deeper and paid £5 to a Mr Isacke for ‘drawing my Lady Wortley’s picture’.41

35

Robert Tittler, ‘George Cottington and the Dering Family Portraits of 1626’, Burlington Magazine, 151:1273 (April, 2009), 207–11; Laetitia Yaendle, ‘Sir Edward Dering of Surrenden Dering and his Booke of Expenses, 1617–1628’, Archaeologia Cantiana, 125 (2005), 332. 36 Based on the frequently cited price index of a composite unit of consumer goods in southern England, by E.H. Phelps Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables Compared with Builders’ Wage-rates’, Economica, new series, 23:92 (Nov., 1956), 296–314. 37 Dynasties: Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), p. 108. 38 G.R. Batho (ed.), The Household Papers of Henry Percy, Ninth Earl of Northumberland (1546– 1632), Camden Society, 3rd series (1962), p. 75; Historical Manuscripts Commission, 6th Report, The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Northumberland at Zion House (1877), p. 226. 39 This sixteenth-century set of royal portraits, shown here surrounding a later portrait of Mary in the Meeting Hall of the Society of Antiquaries, typifies the type. 40 Cavendish paid an additional 7s. 10d. for a gallon and a half of oil for the painter which had to be brought in from elsewhere. Riden, Household Accounts, pp. 121, 124, 143, 172. 41 Riden, Household Accounts, p. 140. ‘My Lady Wortley’ refers to Lady Wortley Montague, and ‘Mr. Isacke’ may be Inigo Jones rather than one of the Isaacson Painter-Stainers of London. I am grateful to Catharine MacLeod for this suggestion. No Isacke has been

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Fig. 14. The ‘Arch-Topped Portrait Set’ of monarchs, shown in the Society of Antiquaries auditorium (sixteenth century).

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Had we some idea of the size or appearance of more of these works, we could make some more precise comparisons. Yet it is hard to imagine that most of those intended for quasi-public display in a house such as Hardwick, the main chamber of a livery company hall, or a university college, will have been very small. The subjects of most such sets will have been long deceased, so that generic portraits, which could be turned out rapidly and with little variation, served their patron’s purpose. They may well have been ordered from London workshops and transported to their destination, as was the case when the City of Canterbury secured a portrait of its benefactor Sir Thomas White (1495–1567) in 1608.42 Actual likenesses of deceased figures whose images might still be familiar had to be produced from copies and took longer to produce. Portraits from life, which involved actual sittings, and which may also have involved travel to the client’s residence, took longer still. Prices ranged accordingly, and costs of a painter’s travel and keep had often to be added. Portraits done in these years for London livery companies, university colleges, or provincial towns and cities followed roughly the same patterns as those done for individual patrons. Over two months in 1603 the Merchant Taylors paid Richard Jackes and Edmond Merony (d. 1611) a total of £18 10s. for a set of twenty-four kings including Henry VII, along with paintings of a master and four wardens of the Company, two noblemen, and a painting of the Company arms,43 all of which seems a modest sum for a lot of work. The Clothworkers Company of London probably overpaid the obscure Edward Cumber at £8 10s. in 1608/9 for what (given the subject and its intended location) must have been a large portrait of James I for display in their main hall. The nature of the subject and the prominence of its display demanded one of appropriate size and quality,44 but Cumber himself faded thereafter from the written record. When, as late as 1640, an obscure London painter asked the Ironmongers’ Company for £5 apiece to produce portraits of its worthies, the Company demurred at

found, and none of the Isaacsons are known to have painted portraits. Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 117. 42 White had made benefactions to young clothiers in twenty-four towns. Almost all of the recipient communities commissioned portraits – nearly all taken from the same, by that time familiar, model image – to commemorate the benefaction. The painters are unknown, but a number seem to have been done in the same workshop. Robert Tittler, ‘Sir Thomas White of London: Civic Philanthropy and the Merchant-Hero’, in Tittler, Townspeople and Nation: English Urban Experiences, 1540–1640 (Stanford, 2001), pp. 119–20; Edward Hasted, The History and Topographical Survey of the County of Kent, 12 vols (Canterbury, 1797–1801), XIII, p. 642. 43 Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 117. Merony is almost certainly the ‘M.E.’ whose monogram appears on a portrait of 1606 as catalogued in the painters’ files, Courtauld Institute, Witt Library. 44 Clothworkers’ Renter Warden Accounts, LGL, MS.CL/D/5/4/21 fol. 14, 1608/9. I am grateful to Edward Town for this reference.

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what they considered an excessive price. In the end the painter, known only as Cooke, had to settle for £3.5s.45 Provincially produced portraits went for similar sums. Those who painted them may have lacked the reputation of many of their London counterparts, which could have driven down the price for their services, but they may also have faced less local competition, which might have had the opposite effect. In 1616 the well-established East Anglian painter John Fenn (fl.c. 1616–24) did civic portraits of the local worthies Thomas Bright the elder, and Jankyn Smith, both of Bury St Edmunds, for a total of £3 6s. 8d. He followed up with what was probably a larger portrait of James I for the same borough corporation for the relatively large sum of £11.46 As with Cumber’s portrait of the same monarch, Fenn could probably charge more for a painting of a sitting king than for other subjects, and he would have had to go to the trouble of producing a fairly accurate likeness. These and myriad other known prices suggest that easel portraits of one sort or another, produced by those outside the court circle from the late Elizabethan through the early Stuart eras, ranged fairly constantly from a pound or two to ten or twelve pounds each.47 The same price range applied to universities and colleges. They, too, commissioned large sets of historic subjects mixed in with images of specific figures who were either still alive or recently deceased. The mid-1560s series of paintings of founders and benefactors at Peterhouse, Cambridge, eventually amounting to 25 portraits, and the great Bodley Frieze of 202 portraits done between 1618 and 1620 at the Bodleian Library, are the most familiar examples. Though it remains unclear exactly how many of the Bodley paintings were included in the payment, we do know that the partners John Clarke and Thomas Knight (1590–1652) received £155 for working on what must have been a great number of them between June 1618 and the following February.48 The recompense for that unusually large commission may well have worked out to around £1 an image. Simon Luttichuys, who brought a whiff of continental sophistication to the task, received £10 for one of two portraits of Thomas Morton, future bishop of Chester, Lichfield/Coventry, and Durham, plus 12s. for the frame and 10s. 45

Ironmongers Company, Quarter Court Minutes, London Guildhall Library, MS 16967/2, /306 and /318. 46 Over the years Fenn worked both with and for Sir Nathaniel Bacon of Culford, Suffolk, premier baronet of England and an accomplished amateur painter himself. Fenn probably gained many of his clients through Bacon’s myriad local connections. Margaret Statham (ed.), Accounts of the Feoffees of the Town Lands of Bury St Edmunds, 1569–1622, Suffolk Record Society, 46 (2003), p. 239; Stewart and Cutten, Dictionary of Portrait Painters, p. 191; Karen Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon, Artist, Gentleman and Gardener (2005), p. 8. 47 See, for example, the prices for civic portraits done between 1500 and 1640 as listed in Tittler, The Face of the City: Civic Portraiture and Civic Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), Appendix B, pp. 187–8. 48 J.N.L. Myers and Clive Rouse, ‘Further Notes on the Painted Frieze and Other Discoveries in the Upper Reading Rom and the Tower Room’, Bodleian Library Record, 5 (Oct., 1956), 290–308.

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for gilding, at St John’s College, Cambridge, c. 1637/8.49 He will likely have had an assistant, either an apprentice or a journeyman, carry out the framing and gilding, leaving him to pocket even less of that gross sum. In addition, the recorded cost of twenty-eight known institutional portraits done between 1511/12 and 1640 shows little sustained increase in prices: almost all were done for less than five pounds.50 Again, the cost of easel portraits in real value terms seems if anything to have declined over the years. Vewick received 60s. in 1511/12 for a portrait of Margaret Beaufort at Christ’s College, Cambridge.51 The reasonably well-known Gilbert Jackson (d. 1658) received 65s. in 1638 for one of Lord John Mordaunt for Brasenose College, Oxford.52 Yet inflation had proceeded at some 600 per cent during that span. How may we account for this relative decline in the real cost of most portraits? For one, the growing popularity of portraits over the years amongst both individual and institutional consumers brought a great many more painters to the task so that, especially in the more densely settled areas like London, competition served to keep prices down. Then, too, the growing popularity and availability of prints, symbolized and abetted by the opening of London’s first dedicated print shop in 1603 by John Sudbury and George Humble,53 provided an alternative form of visual commemoration. Prints were even cheaper than paintings, they could be mass produced, and they could much more easily and quickly be distributed. Then, too, the use of canvas, which came into more common use from the latter Elizabethan years, probably lowered costs of production. It required simpler preparation than wood panels, could more easily be cut to size and transported, and might more readily be secured from domestic sources. As long as paintings were valued more for their subject matter than their authorship, their retail value remained modest by continental standards. A culture of collecting may have emerged amongst a few Elizabethans like Leicester and Lumley and then amongst a growing element of the court circle under the early Stuarts. But most even of the more affluent Elizabethan collectors still concentrated on acquiring paintings for their subject matter, with biblical figures, kings and queens, and contemporary ecclesiastical and religious figures 49

BL, Harleian MS 7047, fol. 250. Luttichuys was born in London of Dutch parents, maintained close ties with the Dutch community in London and abroad, and eventually resettled in the Netherlands. He probably trained under one of the Dutch emigrés in London. Tittler, EMBP, vide Luttichuys, Simon. 50 Tittler, The Face of the City, Appendix B, pp. 187–8. 51 Frederick Hepburn, ‘The Portraiture of Lady Margaret Beaufort’, Antiquaries Journal, 72 (1992), 118–20, 130, 136; Roy Strong, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits (2 vols, 1969), I, p. 20; C.H. Cooper, Memoir of Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby (1874), pp. 199–200. 52 Rachel Poole, Catalogue of Portraits in the Possession of the University, Colleges, City, and County of Oxford, Oxford Historical Society Publications (3 vols, 1926), II, p. 247. 53 Leona Rostenberg, English Publishers in the Graphic Arts, 1599–1700: A Study of the Printsellers and Publishers of Engravings (New York, 1963), p. 2.

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topping the list of desiderata. Works on those wish-lists were priced according to such criteria as the prominence of the subject and the size and complexity of the work without regard for whomever painted them, all of which kept their costs in check. Though documentation of such evaluations remains sparse, much can be gleaned from the paintings listed in the 1575 household inventory post mortem of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury.54 Parker was a learned and wealthy man who could afford to commission or purchase any portraits he wished to have. He was probably advised in his acquisitions by his long-time chaplain and friend Stephen Bateman (1542–84), an amateur painter himself who actually portrayed Parker.55 But Parker was no connoisseur of what we (or some early Stuart courtiers) would recognize as the fine arts, and he collected portraits of figures whom he considered important to him: admired friends, contemporary political or ecclesiastical officials he will have known and presumably admired, and a few historical representations of eminent people or famous events. Considering that Parker will have entertained many of the subjects of those paintings in the very room in which the works will have been hung, we can be sure that most were substantial works of their time and type rather than mere generic representations. And yet most of them were evaluated at only three to five shillings each. The most exceptional was his Holbein portrait of Archbishop William Warham – for which the Countess Bedford would, a few decades down the line, apparently have paid almost anything – which was rated at £5.56 It is unclear what may have happened to most of Parker’s paintings after their post mortem evaluation, but such estimates were supposed to reflect contemporary retail prices. Just a few years later the paintings listed in the sales inventory of the London stationer Henry Bynneman were similarly evaluated: a framed painting of the Queen at but 5s., and five ‘small pictures’ at a shilling each.57 Those records do not, of course, take account of the precise size of the works in question or myriad other factors which could affect their price. But in an era of substantial and steady inflation, those modest evaluations of paintings are striking. With portraits valued at so little relative cost, most portrait and figurative painters scrambled to make ends meet. Under these circumstances, they were well advised to take on any sort of work they could get, and not to rely exclusively on the production of portraits. Regardless of the genres in which they worked, many painters incurred substantial overhead costs, and the cost of extra hands at the bench counted amongst them. Larger, especially decorative, projects could involve substantial 54

William Sandys (ed.), ‘Copy of the Inventory of Archbishop Parker’s Goods at the Time of his Death’, Archaeologia, 30 (1844), 1–30. 55 Tittler, EMBP, vide Bateman, Stephen; ODNB, vide Bateman. 56 Roy Strong, ‘Holbein in England III–V’, Burlington Magazine, 109 (Dec., 1967), 701. 57 Mark Eccles, ‘Bynneman’s Books’, The Library, 5th series, 12:2 (June, 1957), 82, 85.

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teams, as well as a manager of the whole, so that most of the more successful painters functioned partly as employers or contractors. Whomever held the office of King’s Painter, renamed as the Sergeant Painter in the reign of Henry VIII, enjoyed such a managerial role as a function of his tenure. Sergeant Painters like John Browne or Andrew Wright in Henry VIII’s reign, George Gower, Leonard Fryer and both Jan de Critz and Robert Peake thereafter will have run workshops which employed a number of others. Those numbers will have fluctuated with the work at hand and, as we have seen above, workshop personnel will have run from mere unskilled labourers and formal apprentices through journeymen to secondary painters and even other masters. Those master painters who directed such major projects as royal coronations, funerals, and ships for the Royal Navy essentially acted as contractors. They were remunerated above and beyond their annual stipends, and their posts could be very lucrative indeed. John Browne, for example, served as the ‘master of painters’ for the funeral of Henry VII, for which he received what was then the enormous sum of £94 8s. 8d. In addition to the annuity attached to the office, his appointment as Sergeant Painter to Henry VIII brought additional payments including the £142 4s. 6d. for various works in the Royal Navy (including heraldic devices for the Mary Rose). By 1523 Browne’s wealth was assessed at £1,000, making him one of the wealthiest tradesmen of his time.58 Amongst his several acquired properties, he left a house on Little Trinity Lane to be used as the Painter-Stainers’ Hall.59 Browne’s near contemporaries William Calton the younger (fl.1537–73) and Richard Callard (fl.1522–44) will not have held comparable offices, but they also became quite wealthy. Calton owned numerous lucrative properties in and around London. He was assessed at £100 for the subsidy of assessment of 1541 and double that in 1547.60 Callard’s wealth allowed him to found thirteen alms houses in Islington, along with rental properties to sustain them.61

58

ODNB, vide Brown, John, painter. J.C.K. Cornwall has calculated that of 1,100 tradesmen whose wealth was recorded in Southern England (Rutland, Suffolk, and Coventry) in early Tudor times, only 29 were assessed at £100 or more. Extrapolated from Cornwall, Wealth and Society in Early Sixteenth Century England (1988), Table 1.2, pp. 16–17. 59 ODNB, vide Browne, John; Auerbach, Tudor Artists (1954), pp. 7, 9, 144; Mary Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”: New Light on the Lives of Miniaturists and Large-scale Portrait Painters Working in London in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Walpole Society, 47 (1978–80), p. 177. The current hall is the third on the same site. Browne’s hall was destroyed in the Fire of London, 1666; its successor succumbed to German bombing in 1941. 60 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 156; TNA, C.1/1121/1, C.1/1149/19–20; E.210/10771, E.210/9764, and E. 210/9873; LMA, MS CLA/024/02/009/169; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 49. 61 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 156; TNA, C.1/662/2; John Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster (1720), III, p. 89; Janet S. Loengard (ed.), London Viewers and their Certificates, 1508–1558, London Record Society, 26 (1989), pp. 51–2.

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Though we don’t know their precise wealth, Leonard Fryer the elder,62 both Richard63 and Paul Isaacson64 and the Medway-based painter Thomas Rocke65 also climbed the ladder to financial success with major commissions from the Royal Navy. And though he never gained the post of Sergeant Painter and managed his resources poorly, Rowland Buckett was perhaps the most successful and well patronized master painter of his age. In 1599, while still in his twenties, he was commissioned to paint a portrait of Queen Elizabeth as a gift to the mother of Sultan Mohamet III.66 But portraiture was not his true forte, and most of his commissions came in subsequent years from the great patrons and builders of the day for decorative work on their estates: an extensive decorative scheme for Robert Cecil at Hatfield House and Chapel for £417 followed by substantial commissions from the earl of Rutland, the earl of Middlesex (Lionel Cranfield), Edward Alleyn at Dulwich, Lord Spencer at Althorp, the earl of Carlisle, Sir Henry Hobart of Blicking Hall, Thomas Sutton at Charterhouse, the countess of Suffolk, the earl and countess of Holland at Holland House, and others.67 The large payments for works such as these did not of course all go to the contractor. They counted as gross income, against which payments had to be parcelled out to journeymen employees, secondary painters, and partners. Apprentices will at least have received their room and board along with the time and resources it took to train them. Overhead costs, accruing to painters at any level, could be considerable as well. Many, perhaps most painters, will have leased at least some of their workspace. Rent on such centrally located premises as Hilliard’s on Gutter Lane may have been the largest single component of overhead costs. A master painter would possess equipment and supplies like mullers for grinding pigments, easels and trestles for supporting panels, pots for holding paints and solvents, and various bits and pieces of workshop furniture meant to last for many years. Brushes and of course pigments and solvents themselves will have had frequently to be replenished, often to suit the requirements of a particular commission. And whilst some of 62

ODNB, vide Fryer, Leonard; Edmond, ‘“Limners and Picturemakers”’, pp. 63, 167, 184–6; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 82–3. 63 Auerbach, Tudor Artists, p. 172; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 115–17. 64 A.P. McGowan (ed.), The Jacobean Commissions of Enquiry 1608 and 1618, Naval Record Society, 116 (1971), pp. 174–5; TNA, PROB 11/244/501; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, pp. 113–15. 65 McGowan, The Jacobean Commissions of Enquiry, pp. 180–1; Henry R. Plomer (ed.), The Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Nicholas, Strood, Part I, 1555–1600; Part II, 1603–1662, Kent Archaeological Society, Records Branch, V (1927), I, p. 129; TNA, Req.2/398/117; Medway Archives Office, Strood, MS RCA/T1/12. 66 ODNB, vide Buckett, Rowland. 67 ODNB, vide Buckett, Rowland; Tittler, EMBP, vide Buckett; Annabel Ricketts, Claire Gapper, and Caroline Knight, ‘Designing for Protestant Worship: The Private Chapels of the Cecil Family’, in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sarah Hamilton and Andrew Spicer (Aldershot, 2005), pp. 131–2.

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the more common paints and pigments were low-cost items, demanding and sophisticated patrons will have required lavish use of some imported pigments which could be extremely costly. An overhead cost of a different sort rested with the difficulties of squeezing payment out of a recalcitrant patron, a number of whom were not notably prompt to respond. In the late 1540s the prominent arms painter John Childe had even to bring suit in Chancery against Richard Guylle for non-payment of £3 6s. 8d. for providing heraldic devices at a family funeral.68 A few years later William Ap Ryce (d.1550s) also went to Chancery to reclaim a payment: £4 for painting the ceiling and high cross of a Devonshire parish church. When the churchwarden who was to have paid him refused to do so, another parishioner paid him instead, and then sued the churchwarden to reclaim the payment.69 Having painted at Copthall for the earl of Middlesex in the 1630s, the painter James Mylton (fl.1630s) had to plea for his payment of 14s. for materials and £5 for workmanship as he was in financial distress. The prize for the most poignant appeal for payment must go to the Londoner Thomas Selby (d. post 1620), whose 1619 appeal to Lord Zouche for payment included the claim that Selby was now facing suit from his own employees for non-payment to them, so that he faced the utter ruination of his business.70 All these factors, along with travel to the worksite, room, board, and workspace, were subjects for negotiation, and made for the complexity of contractual arrangements. The larger, well-established workshop will have accumulated more of its own supplies and equipment over time than that of the small independent painter, though the more prestigious painters who maintained such operations will have been able to command contracts which were more inclusive of such requirements to begin with. Those labouring painters employed by the Revels or the King’s Works will have had their supplies provided through the office of the Sergeant Painter of the day or his designates.71 It also has to be considered that some kinds of painting were somewhat seasonal activities, even more so than were such crafts as, for example, carpentry, plumbing, tiling, and glazing. This seasonality would even have included variations between northern and southern parts of the country. The shorter daylight hours of winter – shorter still in northern regions – affected them all, but the very temperature-sensitive nature of the painter’s materials simply ruled out almost all outdoor painting in the winter months. Pigments ground in an oil base became too unworkably stiff to apply in cold weather. The adhesion of paint to plaster, wood, or stone diminished as the temperature dropped, or on exterior surfaces which remained damp. Even indoor painting became 68

Childe vs Gylle, TNA, C.1/1209/14. TNA, CP.40/1068/1298f; CP.40/1127/2405d; and C.1/819/12. The parish name is illegible. 70 BL, Egerton MS 2584, fols 108–9. I am grateful to Edward Town for this reference. 71 Albert Feuillerat (ed.), Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908, repr. 1968), pp. 178, 201 et passim. 69

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compromised in the dwindling daylight hours and chill of the winter season. The greater reliance on candles and candlelight – a poor substitute in any event for natural light – made for an added expense in the marginally financed shop, while soot from open fires threatened to adhere to the painted surface. Statutory definitions of the length of the working day recognized this seasonality. A working day for most trades was defined in the Statute of Artificers, 5 Eliz., c.4, as running from 5 am to 7 or 8 pm between March and September and from dawn to dusk between September and March, with two and a half hours allowed for meals and rest. In actual practice, shorter days in northern regions reduced the working hours. The received income of many trades was often accordingly lower for winter work.72 It is no doubt in part the seasonality of the occupation which induced many painters to adopt a by-employment which they could pursue ‘in the bleak mid-winter’. Some such employments were related to the trade itself: the making of pigments,73 the designing of tapestries,74 the sale of pictures,75 the drawing of maps,76 or the construction of genealogies77 were natural concomitants to one or another sector of the trade. The market for such ancillary employments will not have been far to seek, so that, for example, the Revels painter Humphrey Horsenaile (fl.1550s) found it easy to sell mercery wares for making costumes to the same office.78 But some such by-employments remained entirely unrelated. Quite a few painters turned their hand at barbering.79 Humphrey Jenkinson (fl.1590–1620) worked as a painter and trumpeter.80 The notorious painter-stainer Edward Boyer earned a good living in the 1630s as whoremaster, 72

Donald Woodward, Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450–1750 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 138–41. 73 Paint-making supplies left by the London Painter-Stainers Andrew Wright and Jeremy Crew indicate their involvement in the manufacture of particular pigments: TNA, PROB 11/29/379; TNA PROB 11/174/649. 74 ODNB, vide Cleyn, Franz de/Francis de, and Gibson, Richard ‘Dwarf’. 75 The large issue of the retail sale of paintings, much of it done by painters themselves by the latter decades of the era, has been addressed in Tittler, ‘Paintings off the Peg: The Retail Sale of Paintings in Tudor and Early Stuart England’, Journal of British Studies, 60:4 (October, 2021), 919–40. 76 Kim Sloan, A New World: England’s First View of America (Chapel Hill, 2007), pp. 100, 184, 188, 198, 202, 214, 222; ODNB, vide Lyne, Richard; Rogers, William; Smith, William; P.D.A. Harvey, Maps in Tudor England (Chicago. 1993), p. 32. 77 ODNB, vide Hogenburg; Arthur; Lyne, Richard. 78 Albert Feuillerat (ed.), Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain, 1914, repr. 1968), p. 201. 79 As many as six of the Chester painters also worked as barbers, but the same occupational combination is also recorded in Manchester, Hemel Hempstead, and Denbigh. Chester Record Office, MS ZG 17/1; Archbishop of York’s Register ref. 31 f.75v, https://archbishopsregisters.york.ac.uk/searches/index?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_term=painter; William LeHardy (ed.), Calendar to the Sessions Books and Sessions Minute Books of the County of Hertford, 1619–1657 (Hertford, 1928), pp. 6, 10, 31, 33; Denbighshire Archives, MS BD/A/113. 80 LMA, MS DL/C/B004/MS09171/020/314v; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 118.

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taking fees for connecting visiting foreign merchants and others with willing women.81 And of course some of the more affluent painters invested in property even, as we’ve seen above,82 in such ventures as the Royal Exchange, where prominent Painter-Stainers like George Carleton the elder and John Potkin the elder probably gained as much or more by their rental income as by their painting.83 Then as now, it often took wealth to gain wealth. Aside from the fashionable portrait painters of the late Elizabethan or early Stuart era or the elite contractors like Browne, Buckett, or de Critz, the next most lucrative sector of the painters’ trade lay in arms painting. As we’ve seen, opportunities for the arms painter accrued in civic ceremonial (most prominently in the annual Lord Mayor’s shows), in the provision of arms for funerals and state occasions, and in supplying arms, however contrived, for what seemed to some like every aspiring yeoman in the country so that he could strut his stuff upon the local stage. Lord Mayors’ shows of the Elizabethan and early Stuart years in particular involved enormously lavish and expensive displays, and certain painters established reputations for producing them. Men like John Grynkin (d.1620) and Richard Munday or Mundy (1588–1640) were amongst those who served as principal contractors for the painting work on several such shows each, employing myriad others in the task, and sometimes partnering together. Grynkin painted and did related work in the Lord Mayors’ Shows of 1604, 1609 through 1616, and 1618. He received £75 for providing the properties and ‘devises’ for the 1611 show, working with the producer Anthony Munday, and £310 for his work on the 1613 show, on which he seems to have been the overall producer.84 Anthony’s son Richard painted banners and other ceremonial 81

Bridewell Hospital, Court Minutes, MS Bcb–03, pp. 108, 255, 274–5, et passim. See above, p. 84. 83 Carleton even rose to the office of Master of the Company, held several shops in the Royal Exchange, and may additionally have worked as a successful mercer, holding and letting his shops as an investment. Painter-Stainers’ Company of London, Court Minute Book, LGL, MS. CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/1r. et passim; Alan Borg, The History of the Worshipful Company of Painters, Otherwise Painter-Stainers (Huddersfield, 2005), p. 210; TNA, PROB 11/168/379 and Req 2/407/19; Town, ‘Biographical Dictionary’, p. 52. Potkin, who was also a Painter-Stainer, held leases to one and a half shops on the Exchange. Borg, Painter-Stainers, pp. 49–52, 210; LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/1, et seq.; J.L. Chester, London Marriage Licences, 1521–1869, ed. Joseph Foster (1884), column 167; Town, ‘A Biographical Dictionary’, p. 158; G.G. Harris (ed.), List of Witnesses in the High Court of Admiralty, 1619–1643, List and Index Society (2 vols, 2010), I, p. 243. 84 LGL, MS. CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/46; Jean Robertson and D.J. Gordon (eds), A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London, 1485–1640, Malone Society Collections, III (1954), pp. 62, 72–3, 76–9, 81–2, 88, 94–7; Tracey Hill, Pageantry and Power: A Cultural History of the Early Modern Lord Mayor’s Show, 1558–1639 (Manchester, 2010), pp. 61, 66, 75–6, 84, 88. 82

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objects for Lord Mayors’ shows, including the 1618 pageant of Sidero-Thriambos, written by his father, and other shows in 1605, 1613, 1621, 1637, and 1639.85 Even if they did no more than provide for armigerous funerals and state occasions, arms painting alone could be very lucrative. As noted in Chapter 5, licensed arms painters in the early Stuart era charged between £10 and £60 for the increasingly lavish displays at armigerous funerals, with charges directly depending not only on the status of the deceased, but also on the extent of the regalia to be provided, and on the overhead costs of materials, wages, and travel.86 In addition, arms painters could provide the extensively documented genealogies required by an armigerous funeral or marriage. Henry Lilly is said to have received the enormous (and truly exceptional!) sum of £1,200 in 1634 to construct an elaborate genealogy for Sir Kenelm Digby, tracing Digby’s family to Saxon origins.87 When, by the early seventeenth century, celebrated arms painters like Scarlett, Lilly, Munday, or John Taylor could, as we have seen, legitimately take on three or four funeral assignments in a month at anywhere up to about £60 each,88 they will have had to maintain large workshops and to defray considerable costs of overhead. But specialization in a single medium could also allow them to enjoy the economy of scale in acquiring supplies, and to organize a considerable specialization of function amongst their workers. No wonder that there was such a scramble for the eight places which the College of Arms eventually allocated to the Painter-Stainers to paint arms for funerals!89 And no wonder that someone like Scarlett, whose efforts at portraiture were unrefined and unsuccessful, should have stuck to that at which he excelled. These leading arms painters no doubt did much of the contracted work themselves, but some of their efforts must also have gone into supervising others in their employment. Elite portrait painters like Van Dyck and leading arms painters like Scarlett or Lilly required a number of people working under their direction, but for painters of lesser renown full partnerships provided another strategy for sharing work. Such arrangements may have ensued over the short or long term. A partnership immediately increased the range of potential clients known to one or the other partner, thus allowing a business to expand considerably beyond the potential of 85

ODNB, vide Munday, Anthony; BL, Harleian MSS, 1141/item 8, 1529, 1536–66, 1570–1 and Additional MS 4964; LGL, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/MS05667/001/49, 001/98, et seq; ‘Records of London’s Livery Companies On-Line’ (www.Londonroll.org), vide Munday; Robertson and Gordon, A Calendar of Dramatic Records, pp. 97–8, 102, 127, 130, 177. 86 College of Arms, ‘Dethick’s Funerals’, I, fols 113v; 118r, 175r, 186r, 191r, 251r, 263r; Vincent MS 188, fols 3v, 5r, 9r, 10v. 87 ODNB, vide Lilly, Henry. 88 See above, p. 133. 89 See above, p. 131 and also, College of Arms, ‘Painters’ Work Book, O.01, 1619–1634’, fols 17–18, 22–3.

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a single master. Patrons also found such arrangements useful, as shared responsibility meant that the work might get done sooner rather than later. Extensive commissions, or painting programmes which had to be carried out on an annual basis, were particularly well-suited to partnership arrangements. Some London liveries invited painting partnerships to provide for their corporate participation in Lord Mayors’ shows or other ceremonial occasions. They were not alone in so doing. As we’ve seen, the four Chester painters, William Handcock the elder, Randle Holme the elder, Nicholas Hallwood, and Robert Thorneley held for many years the responsibility for maintaining some of the play figures for that city’s annual Midsummer Show.90 Yet there is no indication that their partnership carried over to other work: each of the four worked independently on other occasions. Of course, many institutional patrons maintained long-term commitments with a single painter just as they did with other craftsmen, hiring him year after year and welcoming others whom he might have brought along to assist in his work. For the painting requirements of St Martin’s, Leicester in the early 1620s, the churchwardens turned to Richard Basford, whose father had preceded him as a Leicestershire painter. Richard painted the church’s clock dial in 1620/21, the chancel arch in 1622/3, and so forth. But when it came to painting the entire church they welcomed Basford’s partnership with two other local men, George Longley and Robert Bradshaw (fl.1613–47/8) to complete the work.91 By the same token, the physical proximity of a painter’s residence to potential patrons considerably facilitated opportunities for employment. Parish churches, for example, were likely to employ painters dwelling in the same parish. Such artisans will have been well-known to their churchwarden employers, their physical proximity made for easy and regular contact, and their continuing presence as parishioners worked against the potential for shoddy or fraudulent work. Most contractual arrangements for minor tasks were probably just oral agreements but – though they have rarely survived – larger commissions will almost certainly have been drawn up in written form. Work which was not remunerated for a per diem wage, or for piecework ‘by measure’, was said to have been done ‘by great’, which is to say, according to a comprehensive contract stipulating a price for an entire and often large commission.92 The minutely detailed painters’ bills for completed work which have survived in the painters’ workbooks in the

90

See above, p. 172. Inventory post mortem of Robert Basford, Lincolnshire Archives Office, MS INV/80/174; Thomas North (ed.), The Accounts of the Churchwardens of St Martin’s Leicester (Leicester, 1884), pp. 136, 142, 143, 149, 163, 166; Helen Stocks and W.H. Stevenson (eds), Records of the Borough of Leicester (Cambridge, 1923), p. 109; Henry Hartopp (ed.), Register of the Freemen of Leicester, 1196–1770 (Leicester, 1927), p. 108. 92 Woodward, Men at Work, p. 35. 91

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College of Arms offer the best example of invoices for payment ‘by measure’: each particular item will have been assigned a price.93 While easel painting, like portraiture and some elements of arms painting and decorative work, could be carried out in the workshop, a good deal of a painter’s work had to be done on site and away from the shop. For a few days’ work in, for example, a parish church, it was probably not unheard of for the travelling painter to bed down in the nave for a night or two. But for work of longer duration, and certainly for major projects, the patron could be required to provide more substantial workspace and accommodation. Some contracts called for provision of room and board, or reimbursement for a painter who made his own arrangements. In addition to payment for the work itself, such additional provisions ranged widely in value. At one end of the spectrum we have the modest 2s. 4d. for food and drink which ‘Charnocke the painter’ received for painting the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Articles of Faith at Stoke Charity parish church, Hampshire, which he did over four and a half days in 1571/2.94 At the other end we have the waterside property with garden at Blackfriars and rooms at Eltham Palace given by Charles I to Van Dyck in 1632/3.95 In between those extremes, most cathedrals and larger estates provided permanent craftsmen’s lodges in which painters as well as masons and others could carry on their work, whilst many towns and cities at least provided storage space for supplies.96 In addition to specifying the work to be done, and sometimes providing for the provision of supplies, travel, room, board, or workspace, contracts had of course to specify the payments for doing it. Payment frequently ensued in two or more instalments. An initial payment, often made on signature of the contract, enabled the painter at least to acquire his supplies if they were not to be provided by the patron. Second or subsequent payments ensued on completion of the work. Larger works could be remunerated in several stages: the otherwise unknown William Davis received £40 in five instalments for painting Wadham College Chapel in 1613.97 It is difficult to tell how much of the responsibility for design a patron left to the painter. For smaller works the patron usually knew just what was required, but for larger or more complex commissions much could be left to the painter’s imagination and discretion. Sometimes a patron simply lacked ideas for what was required. Before John Laxton (d.1559) began his work at St Michael’s,

93

See, for example, College of Arms, Painters’ Work Book MS O.01, 1619–1634 and MS Num. Sch. 02/03/006. 94 John Foster Williams (ed.), The Early Churchwardens’ Accounts of Hampshire, (Winchester and London, 1913), p. 95. 95 ODNB, vide Van Dyck, Anthony. 96 Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 120–2. 97 T.G. Jackson, Wadham College Oxford: Its Foundation, Architecture, and History (Oxford, 1893), pp. 43, 156.

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Bishop’s Stortford, the churchwardens sent him to London ‘to view and se other cherchis ther’ for ideas about design.98 Even great institutional patrons could leave a lot to the painter’s discretion. Prior to commissioning work for a Lord Mayor’s Show, for example, livery companies came by the early seventeenth century to invite painters to compete for contracts by submitting designs. In 1622 the Grocers’ Company turned down such a proposal from George Lovett (d. post-1624) to construct a pageant but it paid him £4 for the cost of his submission. In 1635, Robert Norman (fl.1605–post-1635) and John Taylor bid for the contract to make five pageants for the Ironmongers’ Company’s role in the Lord Mayor’s Show, asking £190 for their labours. But they were outbid by John Christmas (fl.1630s) and Thomas Heywood, and received only 20s. (£1) for their presentation and another £1 for submitting their drawings. 99 Though the leading painters of the day, whatever their favoured métier, may have done quite well by contemporary standards, their experiences cannot by any means be taken to represent the occupation as a whole. More likely, they represented a small minority. For the many journeymen who failed to establish themselves as masters of their own shops, or the individual householder working on his own or perhaps with a ‘boy’ to help with the menial tasks, work could be intermittent and profit margins very thin. By the very nature of their standing, journeymen and small masters were much less likely to leave such archival footprints as probated wills or post mortem inventories of their possessions, all of which makes it much more difficult to describe their careers.100 Yet judging by the very steep angle of the occupational ladder and the many painters who have left but a single, fleeting reference in the records, a great many more painters must have lingered at the journeyman’s level than at the master’s. Even at the best of times a great many masters remained small operators.

98

The ultimate project took Laxton twenty-one days to complete, for which he was also reimbursed for travel and accommodation. Stephen G. Doree (ed.), Early Churchwardens’ Accounts of Bishop’s Stortford, 1431–1558 (Ware, Herts, 1994), pp. 290–3; Essex Record Office, MS D/ACR 3/154; J.L. Glasscock (ed.), The Records of St Michael’s Parish Church, Bishop’s Stortford (1882), p. 147. 99 Robertson and Gordon, Calendar of Dramatic Records, pp. 113, 122–4; Hill, Pageantry and Power, pp. 67, 80. 100 Two statutes, 21 Henry VIII, cc. 4 and 5, required that all estates with moveable goods worth £5 or more be probated, a process which involved filing a written will, taking inventories post mortem, and filing the consequent documents in the appropriate ecclesiastical court. Yet smaller estates, exempted from this requirement, were rarely inventoried, while the obligation to probate others fell far short of what was required. See Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean, and Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households 1600–1750 (2004), 22–6, and Michael Zell, ‘The Social Parameters of Probate Records in the Sixteenth Century’, in Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 57 (1984), 107–13.

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This bottom-heavy profile emerges starkly from the exceptionally well-documented city of Chester where, as we have seen, a great many apprentices and journeymen never made it up to the next level.101 As in other places and occupations, failed apprenticeships were particularly common. Those who dropped by that wayside are as likely to have fallen to or even through the bottom of the social pyramid as they have fallen out of the records. We cannot assume they will have painted for a living at all, but they may well have contributed to the poverty and vagrancy so notoriously rife in this era. For lack of capital, opportunity, or ambition, many who did succeed in their apprenticeship never became more than journeymen, or may have cobbled together a livelihood by taking whatever small jobs they could find on their own and working at other times as employees for others. Though they remained within the occupation, their incomes will have been extremely modest. A useful perspective on the wealth of these painters emerges from what has been learned of wage rates for the building trades in general at that time. Though contemporaries did not usually count painting as one of the building trades, decorative painters shared many characteristics with plasterers, plumbers, joiners, and the rest. Rates in those trades had remained stable for some time prior to the 1530s, took a jump in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, and then entered another sustained period of stability from the 1570s well into the seventeenth century.102 Painters’ wages on offer from Crown employment, where they were more abundantly recorded than elsewhere, roughly followed this same pattern. In April, 1532, for example, five painters working on a large painting described as ‘the coronation of our said Sovereign Lord’ each received between 6d. and 12d. a day from the Crown, depending on their status, responsibility, and skill.103 Workmen employed in the refurbishment of palaces under Henry VIII received between 8d. and 12d. at the same time.104 By Edward VI’s reign the Revels paid most of its painters a standard per diem of 12d.105 By the early 1570s the daily rate had risen to a range of 12d. to 20d.106 Revels’ work therefore had its attractions. At least in the sixteenth century its painters were paid as much or more than its joiners, embroiderers, haberdashers, and other such trades,107 and significantly more 101 See

above, Tables 2 and 3. Men at Work, pp. 171–2; Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House, pp. 199–201 and Fig. 1. 103 The painters were Isaac Lebrune, John Augustyne, Nicholas Lasore, William Playsyngton, and Robert Short; James Gairdner (ed.), Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, 5 (1880), item 952. 104 Foister, Holbein and England, p. 97. 105 Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary, pp. 66, 101,131, 167, 173, 199, 201, 203, 218. 106 Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the time of Queen Elizabeth, p. 195. 107 Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary, passim, and Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, passim. 102 Woodward,

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than the average of builders’ wages in the general economy of both northern and southern England.108 Yet Revels work was tied to specific occasions and performances. Requiring large crews of painters intermittently and for short periods, it never provided steady employment. For the well-recorded seasonal entertainments of the year 1573/4, extending from 20 December until 11 January, only one painter worked nineteen days and most worked fewer than ten.109 For that recompense, a Revels painter at the top of the pay scale will have had to possess a considerable range of skills, extending well beyond the mere application of paint itself to such activities as the preparation of paints and of surfaces, gilding with silver or gold, staining cloth, and possibly carving. Notwithstanding this fairly competitive rate of pay, and save for the ‘wardens’ and other officials of the office, Revels’ painters came and went quickly, many of them appearing on its rolls but once or twice in a lifetime. Whether or not Revels’ wages kept pace with inflation is quite another story. Much of the painter’s income will have derived from piece work, which (because ‘pieces’ came in all shapes and sizes) cannot be standardized for analysis. But wage rates can be compared, and once again those recorded in the Revels offer our fullest evidence. They show that the same decline in real income (gross income as measured against the cost of living) applied to the general run of painters throughout the era at hand as for wage earners in general. Especially in the mid-decades of the century, wages did advance, but over the long durée they dismally failed to keep pace with inflation. For building craftsmen in general real wages are reckoned to have fallen some fifty per cent in the first half of the sixteenth century, recovering only modestly for a few decades thereafter, but never reaching more than about three-quarters of their former levels.110 Painters in general experienced similar declines in wages, and thus in living standards, in the same era. As we have seen, the top pay for a painter working in the Revels between 1532 and 1573/4, just over four decades, rose from 12d. to 20d., an increase of sixty per cent. But in those same four decades the cost of living, as measured in the price of a composite index of consumer goods, virtually doubled.111 108 Phelps

Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of Building Wages’, pp. 195–206, and especially Fig. 2, p. 198 and Table I, p. 205. The trades included in this study were the carpenters, masons, tilers, bricklayers, and plumbers, as ‘the building trades’ were not considered to include painters. See also Woodward, Men at Work, pp. 172–91; Airs, Tudor and Jacobean Country House, pp. 195–203. 109 758 Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, pp. 193–205. 110 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables’, pp. 296–314; Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern England (London and New Haven, 2000), pp. 145–9, especially p. 146. 111 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables’, especially Fig. 1, p. 299; for northern towns, see also Woodward, Men at Work, Chapters 6–7.

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From what we can tell from more scattered evidence, it appears that a painter’s remuneration outside the Revels followed a similar trajectory. In 1547 the local master painter John Laxton received 17s. 6d. plus ‘earnest money’ of 12d. for twenty-one days’ work at St Michael’s, Bishop’s Stortford, which amounts to slightly less than a shilling a day.112 Half a century later the price index of consumer goods had virtually tripled,113 but remuneration for such work appears to have remained much the same. In 1597 George Hammond, another small master, recorded that he ‘wrought with Sir Thomas Tressam in his chamber at Elye from Ester in the year 1597 until St Laurence his day after [10th of August], which was eighteen weeks, without meate or drinke or coollors’, for the sum of £4 15s. This works out to less than 5s. 6d. for a six-day working week, or just under a shilling day. Out of that sum Hammond had to defray costs of his ‘coollors’ [i.e., paints], food, drink, and probably travel to and from the worksite. Still, he was glad to work for Tresham again at Rushton, this time with his ‘boy’, for 5s. a week, but also now with costs for materials provided.114 We cannot know if the work done by Laxton and Hammond will have been precisely comparable, but their per diem recompense remained virtually the same over the intervening four decades. All of which suggests that, whilst a very few painters did very well, and many did well enough to hold their own compared to some other building craftsmen, many others lost financial ground in the context of the total economy of the age. A growing number, like Hilliard’s friend John Bossom, seem to have been sinking towards the ranks of an emerging journeyman proletariat: struggling to cope with declining wages and uncertain demand and unable to advance beyond a certain, modest point in the occupational ladder.115 They will often have been left to itinerancy, occasional and probably very diverse employment, or abject poverty.

112 Earnest

money was that sum paid at the signing of a contract, and was often applied to the purchased of supplies. Doree, The Early Churchwardens’ Accounts of Bishop’s Stortford, pp. 290–3; Essex Record Office, MS D/ACR 3/154; Glasscock, Records of St Michael’s Parish Church (1882), p. 147. 113 Phelps Brown and Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables’, especially Fig. 1, p. 299. 114 Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, III (1904), p. lvi. 115 Though neither work discusses painters in particular, both of the following describe the stark reality of contemporary economic developments for urban artisanal groups in general: Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, p. 194; Woodward, Men at Work, Chapters 7–9.

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10 An Occupation in Transition The years between the accession of the Tudors and the outbreak of the Civil Wars form a famously protean age in all sorts of ways. For those in the painters’ trade, no doubt as well as in many others, the era shifted the very firmament on which the occupation had long stood. Along with other developments, art historical scholarship has long probed the impact of continental influences on English visual culture, and the consequences of those influences on the subject matter, techniques, and style of painting in these years. But in a larger sense, the tenor of the times themselves, including the emerging court cultures of both Tudors and early Stuarts, the English Reformation, the shifts and swings of English foreign policy, and the dramatic population growth and the concomitant competition for social status, also all effected developments in the painters’ world which were both substantial and enduring. In the story of those who painted for a living, this was truly a new and distinct era. Through these years English painters encountered a host of innovations, whether of medium, technique, or subject matter which challenged their traditional activities and prompted a choice between adaptation or stagnation. The extent to which the individual craftsman could ride these waves determined his, and occasionally her, success. The extent to which the occupation as a whole made such adjustments determined its future, and the course of English visual culture itself. In consequence, painters in the age of Charles I had quite a different occupational profile from their forebears in the time of Henry VII. Over the span of but a few decades of the mid-sixteenth century the visual subject matter of traditional Roman Catholic worship gave way to the very different visual culture of a nascent Anglican tradition. With it came a new approach to religious subject matter and a surging demand for secular painting both figurative and decorative. After the 1530s the English admiration for continental courtly culture expressed itself in distinct preferences for transalpine and protestant models rather than cisalpine and Roman Catholic. Stranger-painters continued to come to England, though now more from the northern realms than the southern, and they continued to engage in a long and often fraught dialogue with their native English counterparts. In that complex pas de deux (and though it took a long time for even a minority of English painters to understand this and act accordingly) the latter had much to learn from the former. Those English painters who took up that implicit challenge, sometimes by their own foreign training or travels, were able appropriately to respond to evolving patronal requirements and rise to prominence. 233

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Those who didn’t respond as well fared differently. Most painters persisted in looking inwardly to the guild structures which had traditionally protected their monopolies. They clung to what seemed to them the tried and true ways of going about their business. Yet at least in London, stranger-painters could hardly be ignored. Most were mainly seen as undesirable competitors. Some few came to be respected for their skill, their celebrity, and the quality of their patrons. Some strangers paid annual fees to the Painter-Stainers’ Company for permission to paint. Many others did what they could to avoid the Company’s scrutiny, whilst some few of the best were able to attract well-placed patrons who shielded them from it. Even some of the better native English painters – the Goldsmiths Greenbury, Peake, and Hilliard, the Stationer and herald Sir William Segar, the Mercer George Gower amongst them – were freemen of other companies. Their status as freemen allowed them to paint and sell their works, but they saw no particular advantage to joining the Painter-Stainers. Most of London’s native English painters nevertheless gathered under the protective umbrella of that Company. Far from trying to incorporate the ‘picture-makers’, either strangers or native English, into their ranks, the Company was even initially reluctant to collaborate with, for example, Peake and Greenbury, against the perceived incursion of the strangers. The contrast between English and the Dutch painters’ guilds in this regard is striking, the latter being notably more progressive and innovative. Dutch guilds also worked hard to protect their members’ interests and they too fought off potential rivals as best they could. But they welcomed technical innovation, and they also worked creatively to develop markets, facilitate sales, and even educate potential patrons to appreciate the fruits of their production. Far from trying to escape their reach, figurative painters especially clamoured to join their ranks and were welcomed to do so.1 Both in London and elsewhere in England, battles over the right to paint for a living grew most heatedly over the genres of arms painting and portraiture. From the last third of the sixteenth century onwards, portraiture rapidly became the keenest growth area of the burgeoning English market. Nor would just any portraiture do, as the styles and techniques of continental painting rapidly made most native English work seem unrefined, pushing it off the stage of contemporary fashion. That dramatic growth in consumer demand for a more refined portraiture opened the doors for specialization on the part of the more progressive and talented master painters. At least in London, where once a painter had to be able to do almost any kind of painting which came his way, the volume of demand by the latter decades of the sixteenth century 1 The vast literature on this subject is adroitly summarized in Maarten Prak, ‘Painters, Guilds, and the Art Market During the Dutch Golden Age’, in Guilds, Innovation, and the European Economy, 1400–1800, ed. S.R. Epstein and Maarten Prak (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 143–71.

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allowed more painters to specialize in genres like arms painting or portrait painting. At its most highly developed level, some few stranger-painters staffing the larger workshops came to specialize in aspects of the portrait rather than the whole scene: background landscape, drapery, a coat of arms to the side, and similar components. A few of the elite native English painters, men like Gower, Peake, Larkin, Segar, and especially the partly-foreign-trained Hilliard amongst them, certainly attained courtly patronage and considerable recognition. But only a very few native English painters managed to absorb the techniques of, for example, linear perspective, wet-upon-wet blending of colours, or the effective use of shadow. Few had mastered the classical idiom in which many of the strangers had been trained, and few became socially or intellectually comfortable with the stranger-painters who were being welcomed by the court circle and the senior aristocracy. Instead of paying more sympathetic attention to how men like Holbein, Eworth, de Heere, Mytens, Johnson, Rubens, and Van Dyck were making their very emphatic mark through the years, the Painter-Stainers’ Company adopted an inward-looking and defensive stance, worrying instead that, for example, members wearing soiled aprons in public would bring the fellowship into disrepute.2 Under those circumstances the bifurcation between figurative painters, many of them foreign or foreign-influenced, on the one hand and painters-of-all-work, most of them English, on the other, widened substantially throughout the era. With the exception of a handful of familiar names who managed to bridge that divide and establish themselves amongst the more sophisticated clientele, most English painters, and most of London’s Painter-Stainers amongst them, found themselves cut off from that burgeoning, more sophisticated portrait market. They found their future either in such non-figurative work as arms and decorative painting or – especially in provincial England – in figurative painting in the vernacular tradition for a less sophisticated and less affluent clientele. Provincial painters may have felt less immediately threatened by the encroachment of the strangers, but the market for portraiture grew in provincial regions just as it had in the centre. Some provincial painters did what they could to familiarize themselves with the new styles and techniques from abroad. In the case of Chester’s John Souch that familiarity will undoubtedly have drawn from the continental prints and drawings assiduously collected by his mentor Randle Holme the elder and Holme’s son and namesake.3 The result, in such works as Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his Wife,4 offered an interesting but still incompletely realized amalgam of vernacular and formal approaches. Souch had come to understand the need to create the illusion of three dimensions on 2 LGL, ‘Painter-Stainers’ Court Minute Book, 1623–1649’, MS CLC/L/PA/B/001/ MS05667/001, p. 137. 3 Robert Tittler and Anne Thackray, ‘Print Collecting in Provincial England Prior to 1650: The Randle Holme Album’, British Art Journal, 9:2 (Autumn, 2008), 3–11. 4 Shown in Figure 10 above.

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a flat surface, but he did not quite manage to bring it about in this, his most ambitious work. The shift away from traditional ecclesiastical patronage occasioned by the Reformation bore heavily on painters wherever they resided, but perhaps even more so on provincial painters, and especially those in the more rural areas, than on their metropolitan counterparts. That shifting pattern of patronage would explain the gradual flow of painters in the second half of the sixteenth century out of the small towns where monastic and other religious institutions had traditionally provided much of their work and into the more densely settled provincial centres where secular patronage might more readily be concentrated. By the opening years of the seventeenth century places like Chester, Norwich, York, Gloucester, Newcastle, and even more moderately sized King’s Lynn and Ipswich became ever more viable regional centres of painting activity. Provincial painting may not readily have kept pace with the fashions and techniques on show in London, but any notion that painting or even portraiture disappeared from provincial England may be stricken from the record. As Sir Roy Strong has suggested, we still have much to learn about the regional portraiture anchored by such centres.5 Regional demands for arms painting, decorative painting, and painting on glass also remained viable sources of support for the provincial painter as for his metropolitan counterpart. None of this is to argue that the painters’ occupation in any venue remained a secure or lucrative enterprise for all hands. It is also the case that the occupation experienced a consolidation in economic and social terms as well as geographic. As with all occupations, a great many of those who sought to enter through the usual route of apprenticeship failed for one reason or another in their quest. Sundry others who successfully completed that training nonetheless eventually found their way to poverty. One wonders what became of Hilliard’s friend John Bossom, an established and apparently skilled master painter who was so poor he could only afford to paint in black and white. Perhaps Hilliard himself sustained him with odd jobs around the shop. Yet he may just as likely have fallen to the bottom and joined the ranks of the poor, contributing to the crescendo of poverty and vagrancy which drew the constant attention of Crown and Parliament through the Elizabethan years and beyond. A few may have engaged in other occupations at least on a part-time basis. Some will have become economic migrants who moved to or from London in search of work. Some no doubt became more permanent itinerants, whilst still others simply vanished from the trade as they have from the written record. Many are the ways in which people sank to that economic level, and not all who sank were agents of their own demise. The mid-sixteenth-century loss of ecclesiastical patronage especially in rural England may have meant the breaking point for already marginal operations. Especially from the mid-Elizabethan 5 Roy Strong, ‘Forgotten Faces: Regional History and Regional Portraiture’, Historical Research, 78:199 (Feb., 2005), 42–57.

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years, competition from the stranger-painters certainly had its effect. So did the import of cheap paintings from abroad and the proliferation of domestically produced prints, both of which served to keep down the prices which the English painter could command. But for those especially in the middling and lower ranks of the trade, a more serious problem lay in the steady decline in real wages which occurred across the occupational spectrum from the 1540s or so onwards, and which ate away at the buying power especially of journeymen and smaller masters. Despite this downward spiral in some parts of the trade and challenging tendencies in others, some more positive developments accrued elsewhere. When, in 1618, the countess of Bedford made her impassioned plea for the purchase of any work by Holbein from the estate of the dying Sir Nathanial Bacon, she was reflecting the emergence of the celebrity painter onto the English scene. One might say that it had been a long time coming, but it had at last done so in her generation. The Elizabethans certainly had their favourite painters. Men like Hilliard, Gower, de Critz, Hubert de Beuckelaer (known as ‘Hubbard’), William Segar, Peake, and others were well regarded and well patronized by the Crown and some of the senior aristocracy. Yet even by the turn of the century only a few English painters, Hilliard and Segar amongst them,6 reached the wide celebrity which would meet their courtly counterparts of the next generation, and none of them were remunerated for their work at anywhere near the same levels. John, Lord Lumley, and the earl of Leicester typify those elite connoisseurs of the Elizabethan years who pursued collecting as a serious activity, but with few exceptions it was not the English painters, or necessarily even stranger-painters working in England, whose works they most coveted. The same may be said a generation later for collectors like the earl of Arundel or Charles I himself. And though we may think of Hilliard as the greatest native English painter of his time, it was not until Rubens and Van Dyck that any painters working in England received a knighthood for their painting.7 What had happened to create this level of celebration, and this particular appreciation of continental styles and fashions? The answer lies not within the confines of the occupation itself, but in the ambient society and culture of the age, in the changing tastes of potential patrons, and in the burgeoning consumer demand especially for arms painting and for portraiture. By the late Elizabethan years that demand had reached further down along the social pyramid than ever before. As one wag famously complained in 1598, ‘now every citizen’s wife that

6 Elizabeth Goldring, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and the World of Elizabethan Art: Painting and Patronage in the Court of Elizabeth I (London and New Haven, 2014), pp. 163–4. 7 William Segar received a knighthood in 1616 but it came, conventionally enough, in recognition for his services as a herald and diplomat rather than for his painting. ODNB, vide Segar, Sir William.

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wears a taffeta kirtle and a velvet hatt … must have her picture in the parlour’, all of which made grist for the painter’s mill.8 The answer also lies in the changing reputation of painting as an activity, and of at least some of those who pursued it. Up to at least the middle years of the era at hand it would have been a rare gentleman who would welcome a painter to sit above the salt at his table, or who considered painting as anything but a mere mechanical skill. Writing even as late as 1615, George Buck decried the fact that, though painters in the ancient world had been praised by writers such as Pliny, those of his own time were still ‘… counted base and mechanaicall and a more mestier of an artificer and handy craftsman’ so that ‘No gentleman or generous or liberal person will adventure of practicing this art’.9 But by the mid-sixteenth century some people had begun to adopt a more receptive approach, at least to the painting of portraits, as an inherently worthy, socially acceptable, and even intellectually grounded activity. Writing around 1600 Hilliard himself famously referred to it as ‘a kind of gentle painting’, by which he meant ‘genteel’ and worthy of a gentleman’s pursuit.10 Thanks to the availability in English of continental humanists’ works like Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier,11 the notion of what constituted a gentleman had come to include the importance of learning as well as reputation and lineage. William Harrison’s famous definition of a gentleman, noted above in Chapter 5, is most often remembered for its reference to those who could ‘live idly and without manuell labour and thereto is able to beare the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman…’, whilst his subsequent reference to ‘whosoever studieth the lawes of the realme, who so studieth in the Universitie or professeth Physicke and the liberall Sciences’, is often overlooked.12 But the latter phrase, raising the conceptual bar by adding education and a degree of cultural refinement to the mix, was certainly taking on currency when he wrote in 1577. Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–79), who began life as the son of the sheep-reeve for the abbot of Bury St Edmunds and then rode a keen mind and a Cambridge and Gray’s Inn education to the office of Elizabeth’s Lord Keeper of the Great 8 Anon., Queen Elizabeth’s Entertainments at Mitcham (1598), p. 27, as cited in Eric Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625 (Oxford, 1962), p. 165 and widely elsewhere. The pioneering work on the emergence of an English public for portraiture is Susan Foister, ‘Paintings and other Works of Art in Sixteenth Century English Inventories’, Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981), 273–82. Fuller and more recent expositions of this theme may be found in Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait; Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (2012), and Robert Tittler, Portrait, Painters, and Publics in Provincial England, 1540–1640 (Oxford, 2012), especially Chapter 3. 9 Sir George Buck, ‘The Thirde Universite of England or a Treatise on the Foundations of all the Colleges’, printed as an appendix to John Stow, The Annales or General Chronicles of England (1615), pp. 987–8. 10 As cited in, and explained by, Katherine Coombs, ‘“A Kind of Gentle Painting”: Limning in 16th-Century England’, in European Visions: American Voices, ed. Kim Sloan (2009), p. 77. 11 Translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561 and widely read thereafter. 12 William Harrison, The Description of Englande (1577), pp. 128–9.

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Seal, offered an earlier and pithier expression of the point. ‘I may remember’, he wrote in 1561 to his brother-in-law William Cecil, ‘diverse gentlemen that gave gladly great wages to their horsekeepers and huntsmen than to such as taught their children, whereby as they had very ready horses and perfect dogs, so they had very untoward children.’13 In Bacon’s mind, as in Harrison’s, the educated man qualified as a gentleman just as much as someone who could afford to ‘live idly’ and whose ancestry might be traced back for generations. Such a gentleman will have read the classics, as Bacon had done, and will likely have perceived painting as one of the liberal arts as expressed by the likes of Plutarch, Pliny, Aristotle, and a host of others. It is in this early Elizabethan generation especially that portraits of the Queen came to be couched in classical allusions, whilst the social status of those who could at least convincingly produce such representations rose accordingly.14 Though he had acquired a good grasp of the classics, wrote some poetry, and sat for an excellent portrait himself,15 the parvenu Lord Keeper will have been too preoccupied with securing his position at court to become much of a collector. It was his grandson Nathaniel who had time for that, and Nathaniel whose collection the countess of Bedford so desperately coveted. Sir Nathaniel Bacon had travelled abroad, where he admired and closely observed Dutch painting in particular.16 In addition, he no doubt benefitted from his association with the East Anglian portrait painter John Fenn who worked either with or for him.17 But though he did it as a hobby and not for a living, we also now recognize Sir Nathaniel Bacon as one of the most brilliant English painters of his age: probably the first native Englishman to produce landscapes and arguably the single most skilful and innovative amongst all his native English 13

Nicholas Bacon to Sir William Cecil, 17 May, 1561, BL, Additional MS 32,379, fols 26–33. 14 Amongst a large literature on the subject, see especially Susan Foister, ‘Sixteenth Century English Portraiture and the Idea of the Classical’, in Albion’s Classicism, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London and New Haven, 1995), pp. 163–80; Francis Yates, Queen Elizabeth as Astraea’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 10 (1947), 27–82. 15 Anon., National Portrait Gallery no. 164, oil on panel, inscribed 1579. See also Robert Tittler, Sir Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (1976), chapter 4. 16 Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1585–1627) was the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon the younger (1543–1624), and the grandson of the Lord Keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–79), by his first wife, Jane Ferneley. ODNB, vide Bacon, Nathanial, and Karen Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman and Gardener (2006). 17 Fenn did civic portraits of Thomas Bright the elder, and Jankyn Smith, both of Bury St Edmunds, for a total of £3 6s. 8d., a portrait of James I for the same borough corporation of Bury St Edmunds, for which he was paid £11 (or, by some accounts, £40) all in 1616. He worked with or for Bacon at the latter’s Suffolk home in and around the year 1624. Margaret Statham (ed.), Accounts of the Feoffees of the Town Lands of Bury St Edmunds, 1569–1622, Suffolk Record Society, 46 (2003), p. 239; Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten (eds), Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920 (Woodbridge, 1997), p. 191; Karen Hearn, Nathaniel Bacon: Artist, Gentleman and Gardener (2005), p. 8.

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contemporaries. Nor was he shy about his achievements. His several self-portraits show him as the gentleman he was, whilst his funeral monument at St Mary’s Culford in Suffolk shows a toga-clad and fashionably coiffed figure enwreathed with his painter’s palettes (see Fig. 15). Bacon’s funeral image bespeaks a third and final stage in the symbolic elevation of painting as a socially worthy, even genteel, activity over three generations. A generation earlier, George Gower portrayed himself in 1579 holding a balance beam in which his painter’s calipers weigh more than his family’s coat of arms. It asserted his identity as a painter even above that of his gentle heritage, but it omitted any reference to a classical tradition.18 And a generation before that, the mid-sixteenth-century view even of Holbein, likely based on a self-portrait, merely shows him bent at his easel and dressed for work (see Fig. 1).19 Nathaniel Bacon’s great grand-father the sheep reeve wouldn’t have known what to make it of his attainment, but his grand-father, the classically educated Lord Keeper, would have beamed with pride. Over the span of those four generations, some sorts of painting remained a craft, but as it came to be practised by the Rubenses, Van Dycks and Bacons of the day, other sorts rose to recognition as one of the liberal arts. In addition to his consummate technical skill, Bacon’s intellectual grounding, along with his sophisticated grasp of proportion, colour, shadow, and linear perspective, both met that bar and helped to raise it further. The progression of a sheep reeve’s descendant taking up painting as a gentleman’s hobby, raising it to an art form, and boasting of having done so, delineates the course of at least some aspects of the occupation itself over the Tudor and early Stuart era. That route, traced between the grandfather’s plea of c. 1560 for education as a component of gentility on the one end and the grandson’s accomplishments as a true artist on the other, ran through the countryside of the ‘Republic of Letters’. Along that route humanist writers like Sir Thomas More, John Leland, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Mulcaster, Sir Thomas Hoby, and Sir Thomas Elyot had steeped themselves in the works of, for example, Aristotle, Pliny, and Plutarch. Their reading led them to appreciate and celebrate the attainments of classical sculptors like Polydorus and painters like Apelles and Parahesios.20 In the estimation of those learned observers, 18 See image and inscription in Dynasties, Painting in Tudor and Jacobean England 1530–1630, ed. Karen Hearn (1995), plate 57, p. 107. 19 Wallace Collection, ref. M203. The work was once thought to have been a self-portrait, while some have attributed it to Lucas Horenbout. Though its authorship remains uncertain, it does suggest a true to life image by someone who knew the subject well. Along with its style, Holbein’s death in 1543, and Horenbout’s in the following year, suggest the dating of the work cannot be much later. 20 Susan Foister, ‘Sixteenth Century English Portraiture and the Idea of the Classical’, in Albion’s Classicism, ed. Lucy Gent (London and New Haven, 1995), especially pp. 167–8; Foister, ‘Humanism and Art in the Early Tudor Period: John Leland’s Poetic Praise of Painting’, in Reassessing Tudor Humanism, ed. Jonathan Wolfson (2000), pp. 129–50; Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor [1531], ed. S.E. Lehmberg (New York, 1962), p. 52.

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Fig. 15. Nicholas Stone, Funeral Monument of Sir Nathaniel Bacon (1627). Parish Church of St Mary, Culford, Suffolk.

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painting could indeed take its place amongst the liberal arts, and at least some who produced such work could take their place as artists in polite society. By the early Stuart era learned discussions of painting by the likes of John Shute, Hilliard, Henry Peacham, Richard Haydocke (in his translation of G.P. Lomazzo), and others gained wide circulation.21 They helped to legitimize that perspective, and also to educate the potential consumer to the possibilities of at least some kinds of painting as art. That is not of course to say that such a cultural tide raised all painters with it, or that genres aside from portraiture offered similar opportunities. Yet those working painters willing and able to cast off from their traditional moorings could potentially flow with it, thus to emerge in the public’s estimation from the status of craftsman to the ranks even of gentility. In the Elizabethan years that tide also gained force, not so much from the queen herself, who carefully guarded her own image but had little interest in connoisseurship, as from influential collectors like Lumley and Leicester. It surged in James’s reign under the appreciative eyes of Anne of Denmark, the royal offspring Henry, Charles, and Elizabeth, as well as the duke of Buckingham and the earl and countess of Arundel. And it crested with the Caroline court, and especially with the voracious and extravagant collecting of Charles himself, before collapsing with his failure to complete the purchase of the Gonzaga collection and then with the fall of his regime. By then Rubens and Van Dyck had won their laurels. Along with Gerrit van Honthorst and a few others they had created an image of Caroline majesty which, with Van Honthorst’s help, Charles’s family carried on into continental exile. By 1640 the bifurcation between artisan and artist had become, if not yet absolute, then certainly distinct. Whilst provincial painters like John Souch did their best to keep pace, London’s Painter-Stainers stuck to their traditions, and the John Bossoms of the era laboured on in a state of poverty, a set of younger English painters like William Dobson the younger (1611–46), Samuel Cooper (1607/8–72), and Richard ‘Dwarf’ Gibson (1605–90) had began to establish themselves at court, and the likes of the very young Mary Beale (1633–99) could dream of a future as a celebrated and socially respected English artist. These long-term developments in the painter’s trade unfolded not by accident or by chance, nor by the narrow sequence of one painter’s influence upon another, but rather in response to the ambient circumstances of the era. Their explication not only enlightens us about those who painted for a living. It also allows us to view the social, economic, and cultural development of England itself as refracted through that occupational lens. 21

John Shute, The First and Chief Groundes of Architecture (1563); N. Hilliard, A Treatise Concerning the Arte of Limning [c. 1600], ed. R.K.R. Thornton and T.G.S. Cain (1981); Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing with A Pen (1606); Graphica, or the Most Ancient and Excellent Art of Drawing and Limning (1612), and even The Compleat Gentleman (1622, 1634); Richard Haydocke, A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge Carvinge & Buildinge (1598).

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Index Names and places included in tables but not mentioned in the text have not been indexed. Names of people and places mentioned but fleetingly in the text may be searched in the Early Modern British Painters data base: http://spectrum.library.concordia. ca/980096. Abbot, Archbishop George  138 Adams, Robert  199 Adrianson, Leonard  41–2 Allen, John  120 Alleyn, Edward  219 Alva, duke of  34 Ampthill (Bedfordshire)  37 Amsterdam  43, 52 Andrewes, Bishop Lancelot  66 Anguissola, Sofonisba  174 Anne of Denmark, Queen  7, 23, 205, 211, 242 Antwerp  40–1 & n.57, 44, 45, 47, 49, 52, 101, 143 & n.27 Guild of St Luke  Anyston, Richard  125 Apelles 240–2 Apethorpe (Northamptonshire)  154 Applyne, Melchoir  125–6 Applyne, Samuel  125–6 apprentices  9, 88, 113, 140–2, 144, 159–64, 167–9, 172, 176–83, 187–90, 191–3, 219 amongst strangers  22, 25, 28, 42–3, 165 in Chester  101, 104–6, 150, 176–89 & Tables 2 & 4 in Painter–Stainers’ Company of London  55, 57, 71, 161 apprenticeship  13, 43, 56, 60–2, 65, 88, 119, 140–1, 159–68, 172–3, 176–83, 187–9 failed  56, 159–62, 227, 236 in Chester  101, 104–9, 150, 177–89 & Tables 2 & 4 in Painter–Stainers’ Company of London  55, 61–2, 65, 71, 119, 120 n.12, 160–2 Ap Ryce, William  220

Aristotle  239, 240 arms coats of  11, 17, 74–5 royal  6, 17, 23, 122, 137–8, 154 sale of  197–200, 222 see also painting: arms painting Arms, College of  11, 56, 61, 67, 76, 105, 109, 115–38, 173, 198 & n.40, 199 n.43, 223, 224–5 and the Painter–Stainers  56, 61, 67, 76, 129–38 see also heralds arms painters  5, 9, 56–7, 115–38, 145, 149–50, 193, 195, 222–3, 234–5 see also by name arms painting  5, 9, 11, 17, 56–7, 65, 110, 115–38, 139, 145, 149–51, 222–3 art  4–6, 209, 240–2 collecting  5, 7, 23–4, 50, 43–4 & n.72, 101, 121, 206–7, 209–11, 239, 242, 209–11, 212, 216–17 markets and marketing  50, 83, 197–8, 204–6, 209–17, 234–5 see also painters: artists artist, concept of the  6–7, 204, 209–10, 240–2 Arthur, George  138 Arundel, Henry Fitzalan, 12th earl of 133 Arundel, Thomas Howard, 14th earl of  50, 121, 136, 201, 209, 237, 242 Arundel, Anne, countess of  50, 242 Aubrey, John  66 Austin, Nathanial  172 Austin, Widow  172 Austin Friars church, see London: buildings: ecclesiastical

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Ayres, James  169 Babb, Thomas  76, 131, 135 Backson, John  142, 173 Bacon, Sir Nathaniel  97, 209–10, 215 & n.46, 239–41, 241 Fig. 15 Bacon, Sir Nicholas  239–40 Baker, Audrey  15 Baker family  79 Balechouse, John (‘Jehan’)  38–9, 89 Barber, William  97 Bardi family of Florence  25–7 Barking (Essex)  28 Barnard, Lambert the elder  208 Barron, Professor Caroline  79 n.103 Bartringham, William  37 Basford, Richard  224 Bateman, John  150 Bateman, Stephen  217 Beale, Mary  175, 242 Beare, Hans  42 Beaufort, Lady Margaret  79, 214 Bedford, Lucy Russell, countess of   209, 217, 237, 239 Beeston, John  76 & n.92 Begge, Robert  142 Bell, Thomas  98 Bellin, Edward  108–9, 185 Bellini, Giovanni  26 Bellini, Nicolo (Nicholas Bellin; Nicholas Modena)  28, 208 Belvoir Castle (Leicestershire)  162 Benson, Ambrosius  41 Benson, Jan  40–1 Benson, Tannykin  41 Berchley, Thomas  170 Bermondsey 25 Bertram, Mr  73 Bettes, John the elder  24 n.7, 65, 80, 164 Bettes, John the younger  65 n.36 Bettes, Thomas  162 Bettes family  79, 109 Beuckelaer, Hubert (Hubbard)  38 & n.48, 89, 201, 237 Binks, Edward  125 Black Death  14 Blankstone, Harry  147 Blithe, William  150 & n.52

Boghaert, Jan the younger  42 Bolsover (Derbyshire)  39 Bonayre, Didier  89 Bond, Richard  143 books 12–14 illuminated 41–2 of arms  119, 121, 126, 128–9, 207 n.15 pattern books  14, 85, 101, 110, 128, 141–2, 160 sales of  12, 193, 196 booksellers and trade  14, 44, 65, 69, 71, 200 Bossom, John  207, 229, 236, 242 Bowers, Edward  65 n.36 Bradshaw, Robert  224 Braemes, Sir Arnold  39 Brame family  180 Bridge (Kent)  39 Bright, Thomas the elder  215, 239 n.17 Bristol  33, 167 Boyer, Edward  221–2 Bridgewell, Robert  46 Bromfield, Philip  72 Brooke, Ralph  198 Brown, Sarah  139 Browne, John the elder  63, 74, 122–3, 218, 222 Bruges  40, 41, 52 guilds of  40, 41, 52 Buck, George  238 Buckett, Rowland  4, 46, 63, 74, 89, 136 as contractor and employer  104, 159, 193, 201, 209, 222 prominence  63, 67, 74, 80, 219 wealth of  207, 219 Buckingham, George Villiers, duke of  50, 242 building trades  56, 59, 70, 91, 227–8 see also specific trades Bullock, Thomas  42 Burford St Mary (Shropshire)  36 & Fig. 2 Burgundy, duchy of  34, 143–4 Bury St Edmunds (Suffolk)  86, 93, 96, 97, 215, 238, 239 n.17 Butler, Richard  139–40, 150, 153, 154, 156 Bynneman, Henry  217

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Callard, Richard  194–5, 218 Calton, William the younger  218 Cambridge, University of Christ’s College  214 King’s College  25, 28, 145–6, 148 Peterhouse 215 Trinity College  150 n.52 Camden, Samson  76 Camden, William  75–6 & n.92, 131–2 Canterbury  109, 162 n.12, 171, 214, Carleton, George the elder  66, 67, 199 n.44, 222 & n.83 Carleton, Thomas  67 Carlile, Joan  173 Carlile, Ludowick  173 Carlisle, James Hay, 1st earl of  219 Carmyan, Ellis  27 Carpaccio, Vittore  26 Carpenter, Joshua (Jonas)  75–6 Cavalcanti family of Florence  25–6 Cavendish family  39, 208, 212 & n.40 Cawarden, Sir Thomas  30 Cecil, Sir Robert  130, 150, 153, 155, 197, 211, 219 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley  61, 130, 219 Chaloner, Elizabeth  106, 170 Chaloner, Jacob  106, 108, 120–1, 128, 150, 170, 179, 181 Chaloner, Thomas  105–6, 123, 128, 170, 182–4, 187–8 Charles I, King  8, 53 n.104, 202, 210 & n.29, 237 as collector  5, 7, 24, 50, 51 n.100, 53 n.104, 83, 166, 173, 210, 237 Charles V, Emperor  34 Charles IX, King of France  33 Charlotte, Queen  10 ‘Charnocke the painter’  225 Chatillion, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, Seigneur de  33 Cheshire  86–7, 91, 99–109, 125, 149–50, 160 Chester, city of  99–109, 172 buildings 194 Golden Phoenix Inn  192 n.12 Phoenix Tower  101–2 & Fig. 8 St Mary on the Hill  107

Ye Olde King’s Head  192 & n.12 Company of Painters, Glaziers, Embroiderers, and Stationers  101, 149, 162, 170, 177–90, 192 n.12 freemanry of  106, 108, 125, 170 hinterland  99–101 & n.28, 104, 106, 149, 160, 179–80 & n.87, 236 painters in  91, 100–11, 149–50, 177–89, 221 n.79, 227 see also by name Childe, John  123, 220 church elements and furnishings fonts 17 pews  17, 23, 150 rood beams, lofts, and screens  6, 10, 15, 17, 168 royal arms  6, 17, 23, 91, 122, 137–8, 195 steeples 17 Ten Commandments  6, 17, 23, 91, 138, 225 see also monuments Clark, John  215 Clark, Peter  60, 91, 96 Cley family  180–1 Clifford, Henry, see Cumberland, 5th earl of Clothworkers, London Company of  214 Clothworkers’ Hall  46 Coke, Edmund  129 Coke, Robert  129 Colchester (Essex)  148 Conquest, Sir Richard  131 Constable, Thomas  63 n.26 Cooke [unknown]  214–15 Cooper, Samuel  242 Cooper, Tarnya  3, 110 n.63 Cotgrove, Hugh  124 Cottington, George  63, 65 n.36, 68, 80, 83–4, 205, 212 courts of law Common Pleas  12 Exchequer 70 King’s Bench  12 Marshalsea (High Court of Chivalry)  129, 131–2, 134, 136, 199 n.42

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Middlesex Sessions  70 Star Chamber  69–70, 123 Coventry  168–9, 178 n.77, 179 n.80, 218 n.58 Crewe, Jeremy  67 Cromwell, Thomas  145 Cumber, Edward  214 Cumberland, Henry Clifford, 5th earl of  38–9, 208–9 Curd, Mary  143 Cutler, Arthur  163, 198 n.38, Cutlers, London Company of  75 Dakins, William  125 da Maiano, Giovanni di Benedetto 27–8 Danbury, Elizabeth  12 Dare, Gualtier  34 da Rovezzano, Benedetto  26 Dauphin (Dolphin), Louis  154–6 Davies, John  71 Davis, William  225 de Bray, Jacques  34 de Campion, Henrick  41 de Campion, Janakin  41 de Clare, Eleanor  115 decorative painting  5–7, 10 16, 26, 30, 50, 77, 85, 97, 122 n.25, 153, 171, 202–3, 225, 233 de Critz, Jan the elder  5, 46, 72, 80, 84, 121, 163, 164, 193, 211, 218, 222, 237 de Critz family  42, 79 de Frank, Jan  42 de Heere, Lucas  38, 39, 40 n.57, 163, 201, 235 de Horse, John (Jean D’Ours?)  45 de Jonge, Claude  166 de Keyser, Hendrick  38–9, 201, 208–9 Derby, Stanley earls of  100, 106–7 n.46, Dering, Sir Edward  134, 212 Dering family  212 Dethick, Sir William  123, 129, de Vos, Daniel  49 de Vous, Lyeuen  40 n.57 de Wale, Louis  40 n.57 Dewsbury, Anne  162, 169 n.48, 178, 184, 185

Dewsbury, John  169 n.48, 184, 185 Dewsbury family  179 Digby, Sir Kenelm  223 Dispenser, Hugh  115 Dobson, William the elder  65 n.36 Dobson, William the younger  242 Dorchester 37–8 Droeshout, Martin  49 Dudley, Robert, see Leicester, earl of Dugdale, Sir William  109 n.56 Durham St Oswald, parish church of  195 n.26 Dutch Triumphal Arch  46–9 & Fig. 4 Dutton family  180 Earle, John  78 Early Modern British Painters data base  x– xi, 4, 92 & nn.16–17 East Anglia  15, 36–7, 91–100 & Table 1, 147, 180 churches  15–16, 147 painters in  15, 36–7, 91–9, 149, 164 see also Norfolk, Suffolk Edward I, King  115 Edward III, King  10, 58, 212 Edward IV, King  14 Edward VI, King  6, 22, 35, 212, 227 Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia  52, 242 Elizabeth, Queen of England  23, 28, 31, 47, 208 paintings of and to  28, 31, 121, 154, 219 policies of  7, 21, 32–3 Elson, Arnold  45 Elstrack, Joseph  151 & n.59 Elyot, Sir Thomas  240 Essex, Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of  121 Essex, Francis, countess of  121 Eton College  16 Eve, Emma  142, 173 Eve, William  141, 173 Evelyn, John  206 Evil May Day  16 Eworth, Hans  23, 24, 40, 57, 235 Exeter 130 Fenn, John  215, 239 & n.17 Flower, Barnard  144–6 Foister, Susan  3, 29

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Forsette, Andrew  98 Foster, William  75 & n.87 Framway, Ralph  179 Framway family  179, 182, 187 France  14, 22, 23, 28, 32, 33 Francis I, King of France  28, 33 freemanry  13, 56, 65, 89–90, 159, 165, 168, 171, 176, 178–9 by apprenticeship  13, 65, 159, 178–9 by patrimony  13, 65, 178–9 by redemption  13, 65, 178–9 non–freemen  13, 56, 171 widows  168–9 & n.48, 170, 178–9 Freesingfeld, William  122 n.25 Freesingfeld family  79 Frere, Robert  125 Fryer, John the younger  124 Fryer, Leonard the elder  80, 218, 219 Fryer, Leonard the younger  80 Fryer, Leonard III  80 Fryer, Percival  80 Fryer, Robert  80 Fryer, William  80 Fryer family  79–81 funerals  27, 58, 89 & Fig. 6, 100, 106, 117–19, 124–37, 209, 218, 222–3 Gage (Gagné?), Charles  38, 90 Gardiner, Bishop Stephen  28, 212 Garrett, Mark, see Gheeraerts, Marcus Garse, Timothy  195 n.27 Garse, Widow  169 n.48, 170, 184, 187 Geberd, Pierre  34 Geldorp, George  52 n.103, 211 Gentileschi, Artemesia  174–5 Gentileschi, Orazio  174 Gheeraerts, Marcus the younger (Mark Garrett)  46, 193 Gheeraerts family  42, 79, 164 Ghent  31, 40 & n.57, 52 Ghirlandaio, Rodolfo  26, 33, 163 Gibson, Richard ‘Dwarf’  242 gilding  14, 28, 70, 72, 133, 146, 168, 216, 228 glass  16, 23, 77, 118, 139–40, 148–9 glass painters  6, 9, 10, 11, 13–14, 138–57 foreign  14, 24, 143–8, 150, 154–6 see also by name

glass painting  6, 9–10, 11, 13, 16, 23, 24, 65, 77, 87, 115, 138–56, 193, 204, 236 in Chester  148–50 in Norwich  13, 140, 147, 149, 164 in York  13, 141–2, 147, 149 techniques  139–40, 143–4, 153 glaziers  11, 101, 135, 139–50, 153, 155, 164, 193 Glaziers, London Company of  150 Gloucester  86–7, 110–11, 236 Glover, Nathaniel  63 n.26, 72 Glover, Robert  123, 129 Glover family  78 Goldbeater, Thomas  140 Goldsmith, Oliver  89 Goldsmiths, London Company of  66 n.39, 83, 234 Gonzaga family of Mantua  5, 242 Goodrick, Matthew  80 Gorhambury House (Hertfordshire)  155 Gower, George  80, 84–5, 171, 193, 208, 210, 218, 234–5, 237, 240 Great Yarmouth  96 Greenbury, Richard  80, 83–4, 152 & n.66–153 & n.70, 154, 156, 205 n.4, 234 Greenwich Palace  25, 27–8, 124, 174 Greenwood, Robert  128–9, 194, 198 Gresham, Thomas  197 Grimsby (Lincolnshire)  90, 98 Grocers’ Company of London  75, 124, 160 n.1, 226 Grynkin, John  222 guilds and livery companies  12, 13–14, 55–6, 60–2, 67–9, 82, 161, 168, 172, 176, 179, 226, 234 Dutch  40–3, 50, 83, 234 see also individual guilds and liveries Guildford (Surrey)  134 Guylle, Richard  220 Haberdashers’ Company of London  75, 179 Hackluyt, Richard  33 Hall, John  138 Hallwood, Nicholas  169 n.48, 125, 188, 224

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Hallwood, Richard  169 n.48, 172, 187 Hallwood, Widow of Nicholas  169 n.48, 188 Hallwood, Widow of Richard  188 Hallwood family  104, 179, 182, 184, 187 Hamling, Tara  7 n.6, Hammond, George  229 Hampton Court Castle (Hereford)  155 Hampton Court Palace  28, 47, 147 Handcock family  104 n.39, 179, 188 Handcock, Gwen  109 n.48, 181–5, 188, 224 Handcock, William the elder  104, 107 n.48, 169, 179 n.84, 181–5, 188, 224 Handcock, William the younger  172, 182, 188 Hannemann, Adriaen  51 & n.95 Hardwick Hall (Derbyshire)  38–9, 212, 214 Harrison, William  116, 238 Hart,[unknown] 131 Harye (Harry), Henry  142 Hatfield House (Hertfordshire)  153, 155, 201, 205, 219 Hatton, Sir Christopher  120–1 Hawarden (Flintshire)  179–80 Haydocke, Richard  43–4, 242 Haypole, Thomas  153 Hearn, Karen  3 Heath family  79 Heath, John the elder  63 Helper, Joseph  161 & n.60 Henrietta Maria, Queen  7,23 Henry II, King of England  10 Henry II, King of France  33 Henry III, King of England  10 Henry III, King of France  33 Henry VII, King  8, 25, 29, 58–9, 209, 214, 218 Henry VIII, King  14, 25–7, 28, 29, 75, 193, 208, 218, 227 Henson, Peter  128 herald painters see arms painters heraldry  11, 115–38 see also arms painting heralds 115–38

see also Arms, College of; and individual names Herne family  79 Herne, Alice  171 Herne, George  124 Herne, William  64, 171 Heskett, Henry  202 Heyward, Nicholas  140 Heyward, William  140, 164 Hill Hall (Essex)  38 Hilliard, Nicholas  4, 13, 24, 51, 80, 84, 130, 164, 207–8, 210 finances  207, 210 status and celebrity  3, 207 n.10, 235, 237 views on painting  49–50, 174, 190–1, 238, 242 workshop  164, 190–1, 202, 219, 234 Hobart, Sir Henry  219 Hofnagel, Joris  41 Hogenburg, Remigius [Remigius Highhill] 46 Holbein, Hans the younger  5, 22, 24 n.7, 30–1 & Fig. 1, 75, 207, 209, 217 celebrity and reputation  3, 23, 24 n.7, 29, 40, 207 n.10, 209–10, 235, 237 denization  28 n.22 finances  207, 209, 210 versatility  5, 107, 151–2, 163, 204–5 views on painting  49–50, 174, 190–1, 238, 242 work of  23, 29, 166, 208, 209, 217 workshop  75, 163, 164, 166, 193 Holkham (Norfolk)  98 Holland, Henry Rich, 1st earl  219 Hollar, Wenceslaus  109 n.56 Holles, Sir Gervase  90–1, 98, 201 Hollins, alias Holland, William  71 Holman, Daniel  163 Holme, Randle the elder  4, 101 & n.33, 103 (Fig. 9), 104–9 & Fig. 11, 170–1 & n.53 and heraldry  104, 106–07, 125–6, 128 n.54, 150 apprentices and journeymen  103–4, 108 & n.52–109, 123, 128, 162,

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179 & n.80, 181–5, 187–9, 205, 225 see also by name as collector  108, 235 residence  107 (Fig, 11), 192 & n.12 work of  101–3 & Fig. 9, 107–8, 149–50 Holme, Randle the younger  101 & n.33, 104–9 apprentices and journeymen  108, 182, 187 arms painting  108 as collector  108, 235 Holme, Randle III  117–18 Holme, William  108 & n.51 Hone, Galyon (Gerrard)  144–8 & n.27, 193 Hony, Francis  40 n.57 Hooker, Richard  151 Hooker, Robert  123, 129 Hopkins, Jonas  63 n.26 Horenbout, Gerard  31 Horenbout, Lucas  30–1 & Fig. 1, 44, 208, 240 n.19 Horenbout, Susanna  31, 32 & n.29, 167 & n.34 Hormer, John  68 Horsenaile, Humphrey  221 Hosking, Jean  91, 96 Hoskins, Professor W.G.  10 n.1, 64 n.34 Houghton St Giles (Norfolk)  15 housing design  16, 190–1 & n.2 Hovaunt, Stabull  40 n.57 Howard, Lord William  154, 202 & n.57 Howard, Thomas, 2nd duke of  26 n.15 Humble, George  216 iconoclasm  11, 22, 148, 154 inflation  212, 216–17, 228–9 Inglis, Esther  173, 175 Fig. 13 Inglis, Thomas  142 Inglis, William  142 Inglis family  141 Inglishe, Pengrace  46 Ipswich  93, 96, 98, 148, 180, 236 Isaacson, Henry  66–7 Isaacson, Paul  66, 74, 124, 136–7, 164

Isaacson, Richard the elder  66, 163 n.18 Isaacson, Richard the younger  163 n.18 Isaacson family  79 Italy  14, 25, 26 n.15, 174 banking houses  25–7 cultural influences  14, 15, 26–29, 32–3, 52, 133–4 see also painters: Italian Jackes, Richard  212 n.41 Jackson, Gilbert  216 James I, King  8, 46, 49 (Fig. 4), 50, 121, 134 coronation arch  46–9 & Fig. 4 paintings of  152, 211, 214, 215, 239 n.17 Janson, Jacob  42 Jemson, Thomas  192 Jenkinson, Humphrey  221 Johnson, Cornelius  24, 39, 52, 89, 110, 165 & n.27, 193, 208, 210 Jones, Inigo  67, 84, 121 journeymen  59, 80, 120, 140, 159, 165, 168–9, 177–9, 201 careers  56, 120, 162–3, 177, 191, 226–7, 237 in Chester  104, 108, 162–3, 169–70, 177–9, 185–6 (Table 3), 227 in workshops  9, 118, 190, 191–2, 201 regulations regarding  22, 140, 165, 168–9, 193 strangers and  22 Joyce, Ruben  138 Kaye, John  126–7 & Fig. 12, 149 Kello, Bartholomew  173 Kelsey, John  46 Kent, county of  39, 100, 134, 164 Kerman [Kerreman?], Balthasar  40 Ketel, Cornelius  212 Keyrnix, Alexander  51 Kimby, Richard  131, 133–6, 198 Kimby, Robert  198–9 Kimby family  79 King, Daniel  179, 184 King’s Lynn  96 n.18, 98, 150, 236 King’s Works, Office of the  24–8, 31, 46 n.81, 53, 163–4, 220

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Knight, Edmund  129 Knight, John the younger  46 Knight, Thomas the younger  132, 215 Knight family  79 Knole (Kent)  159, 201 Knowles, John  142 Knyvet, Sir Thomas  26 & n.15 Kyrcke, Samuel  109 Kyrcke, Zachery  109 Lake, Bishop Arthur  132 Lane, Geoffrey  155 Langton, Thomas  155–6 Lanier, Nicholas  52–3 & n.104 Larkin, William  65 n.36, 235 Laud, Archbishop William  7, 24, 91, 151 & n.58, 154, 204 Laxton, John  225–6 & n.98, 229 Leathersellers, London Company of Lee, John  141–2 & n.14, 172–3 Lee, Richard  129 Lee, William  73 Leech, Emma  183, 188–9 Leech, Richard  188 Leech, Robert I  169 n.48, 183, 185, 188–9 Leech, Robert II  188 Leech family  104 n.39 Leicester, borough of  16, 162, 168, 224 St Martin’s Church  168, 224 Leicester, Robert Dudley, earl of  31 as patron and collector  31, 38, 201, 216, 237, 242 portraits of  121 Leigh, [unknown]  198 Leigh, Thomas the elder  90, 185 Leigh, Thomas the younger  185 Leigh, Sir William  135–6 Leland, John  240 LeMoyne, Jacques  30 Lilly, Henry  4 career  4, 76 n.92, 120 & n.11–121 & n.15, 129, 131, 135 income  133, 155, 223 legal entanglements  126–7, 136, 199 & n.43 limners  12–13, 31, 33, 44, 65, 89, 193, 199 n.45, 205

see also by name limning  12–13, 193 Lincolnshire  90, 124 Little Easton (Essex)  154 Lockey, Rowland  80, 152 Lollards 16 Lomazzo, Giovanni  43–4, 342 London, city of  5 buildings: ecclesiastical All Hallows Barking  154 Austin Friars (‘The Dutch Church’)  42–3 & Fig. 3, 165 n.27 French Church, Threadneedle Street 42 St Dunstan-in-the-West  154 St Leonard’s Shoreditch  154 St Mary Colechurch  154 St Paul’s Cathedral  78 & n.96, 84, 155 buildings: secular  190–5 Arundel House  81 Bedford House  81 Bridewell Hospital  120 Cecil House  81 Christ’s Hospital  199 n.43 Guildhall  10, 154 Inner Temple  154 Marshalsea Prison  129, 131, 132, 134 New Exchange  153, 197 Royal Exchange  66, 197, 199, 222 & n.83 Salisbury House  153 Savoy Hospital  25 Somerset House  81 The Steelyard  36, 209 Whitehall 44 Court of Aldermen  65, 122 freemanry of  65, 176 parishes, wards, and liberties Bishopsgate 33 Blackfriars  33, 51 n.95, 165, 202, 210, 225 Bridge Ward  34 Cripplegate Ward  79 Holborn 153 Houndsditch 193–4

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Hyde Park  199 Old Bailey  34 St Botolph without Aldgate  80 St Clement Danes  81 St Giles Cripplegate  163 St John Zachary  194 St Martin-le-Grand  36 St Peter Westcheap  196 St Sepulchre without Newgate  193–4 & n.17 St Thomas’s Hospital, Liberty of 145 streets  193, 195, 197 Aldersgate Street  201 Charing Cross  81 Cheapside  191, 196–7 Goldsmith’s Row  197 Green Dragon Court  194 & n.17, 196 Gutter Lane  191, 197, 219 Holborn Conduit  193, 196 Little Trinity Lane  73–4 & n.77, 218 St Ann’s Lane  194 St Martin’s Lane  201 Silver Street  198 The Strand  81, 145, 153, 199 West End  80–1, 153 Longley, George  224 Loughborough (Leicestershire)  168 Lovett, George  226 Lulle, Peter  44–5 Lumley, John, Lord  216, 237, 242 Luttichuys, Simon  65 n.36, 215 n.49 Lydiard Tregoze (Wiltshire)  155 Lyzard, Nicholas the elder  4, 29–31, 46, 64, 79, 80 Lyzard family  31 Maidstone (Kent)  119 n.10 Maldon (Essex)  172–3, 194 Mancini, Guido  206 Manning, Henry  120 manuscripts, illuminated  12, 13, 14, 15 Margaret of Austria  31 Marks, Professor Richard  148 Mary Tudor, Queen  23, 31, 96, 212 masons  56, 70, 91, 225, 228 n.108

Mason, Thomas  38 Massey family  79 Matthew, John  109 Matthew, Nathan  109 Mayerne, Sir Thomas  152 Maynour, Katherine  37 & n.45 Melles, William  151–2 Mercers, London Company of  66, 160 n.1 Merchant Taylors, London Company of  124, 214 Meres, Francis  34 Merony, Edmond  214 & n.43 Messing Hall (Essex)  155 Miller, William  151 Mohamet III, Sultan  219 monasteries, dissolution of  21–2, 25, 97, 148 monuments  10, 11, 23, 28, 36–7 (Fig. 2), 117, 118, 123, 240–1 & Fig. 15 Mordaunt, John, Lord  216 More, Sir Thomas  240 Morton, Bishop Thomas  215 Mostyn, Sir Roger  101–3 & Fig. 9, 107–8 & n.108 Mulcaster, Richard  240 Munday (Mundy), Anthony  222 Munday, Richard  131, 133, 134–5, 223 Mylton, James  220 Mytens, Daniel  24, 51 nn.94 & 95, 52, 57, 110, 166, 193, 208, 210, 235 Nantwich (Cheshire)  180 & n.87 Naworth Castle (Cumberland)  154, 201, 202 n.57 Nelson, Professor Alan  44 n.74 Netherlands  7, 23, 49, 83 art market  50, 206–7, 234 guilds  40–3, 50, 83, 234 invasion and war  32, 34–5 painting in  50, 83, 206 see also individual cities; painters: Dutch Newcastle  12, 128, 156, 202, 207, 236 Company of Plumbers, Glaziers, Pewterers, and Painters  12, 156 Nicholson, James  145 & n.27 Nonsuch Palace (Surrey)  27–8

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Norfolk  15, 92–100 & Table 1, 145, 200 Houghton St Giles  15 Ranworth 15 Tivetshall St Margaret’s  91–2 & Fig.7 See also Norwich, East Anglia Norgate, Edward  121–2 Norman, Robert  226 Northumberland, Henry Percy, 9th earl of 212 Norwich  13, 36–7, 60, 86–7, 93–100, 147, 149, 161 n.8, 164, 168–9, 192, 200, 256 glass painting  13, 140, 147, 149, 164 St Michael at Plea  15 see also Norfolk Nottingham 109 Nottinghamshire 125

see also by name Flemish  7, 14, 15, 16 see also by name French  7, 14 see also by name geographic distribution of  13, 79–81, 86–8, 179–80 metropolitan  25, 79–81, 144–5, 153, 201 provincial  13, 35–39, 86–111 & Table 1, 236 German  15, 16 see also by name herald painters, see arms painters in country estates  36–9, 200–2, 208–9, 225 Italian  14, 25–9, 33, 47 see also by name itinerant  13–14, 36–7, 89–90, 97, 160–1, 236 kinship amongst in Chester  176–89 in London  55, 78–81, 176, 179 strangers  25, 40–2, 46, 143–9, 154–6, 165 mortality  169, 172 occupational mobility  176–89 patronage of  6–8, 21–4, 52, 64, 79, 129, 144, 174, 235–6, 238 civic  23, 214–16, 222–3, 225–6 ecclesiastical  6–8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21–2, 91, 96–7, 143–5, 147–56, 208, 224, 236–7 mercantile and gentry  11, 14, 15–17, 26, 126–7, 149–54, 214 n.42 royal and aristocratic  7–9, 11, 14, 22–4, 26, 38–9, 51–3, 58, 82–3, 143–5, 150–1, 208–12, 235, 242 provincial  5, 13, 15, 86–111 scholarship regarding  5, 86–7 & n.3, 139, 205–6, 233 social status  3–4, 16, 24, 115–22, 126 specialization  5, 50, 64–5, 88, 98, 165–6, 204–5, 223, 234–5 versatility  5, 28, 32, 50, 64–5, 88, 98, 140–1, 149–53, 204–5 wages  133, 224, 227–9, 237

O’Connor, David  107 Oliver, Isaac  164 Oliver family  42, 165 Orlens, Hans  40, n.57, 42 Orlens, Henrick  40, n.57, 42 Ormrod, Professor Mark  36 n.39 Oxford 152 Oxford University  155–6 All Souls College  16 Balliol College  155 Bodleian Library  215 Brasenose College  216 Christ Church  155 Lincoln College  155 Magdalen College  153 & n.70, 156 Queen’s College  155 University College  155 Wadham College  155 Winchester College  16 Painter, William  199 n.45 painters  3, 6 adaptability to change  6–7, 233–4 agents for  155–6 artists 3–5 by-employments  44, 221–2, 236 decorative  5–8, 16, 26, 50, 64–5, 80, 85, 89, 201–5, 217–18, 222, 235 Dutch  7, 15, 16, 40–3, 50, 83, 234

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wealth and income  9, 99, 153 n.70, 174, 207–11, 215–19, 222–3, 226–9, 236, 242 women  32, 166–76 widows  168–72, 178–9 see also by name see also apprentices, arms painting, glass painting, journeymen, Painter– Stainers’ Company, staining, workshop personnel, workshop space Painter-Stainers’ Company of London  6, 7, 12, 55–85 admission to  56, 61–2, 65–6 ceremonial activities  55, 73–4, 76, 78, 84, 121 conviviality  67–8, 72 goals of  55, 59, 67–9, 82–3, 101, 161 governance  57–63, 66, 68–9, 72, 76 inception and history  6, 12, 57–8 & nn. 3 & 4, 60–1 litigation  69–71, 134–7 membership  40, 42–3, 55–7 & n. 3, 62, 84 non-practicing members  65–7, 82 portrait collection  75–8 & Fig. 5 power of search  36, 38, 56, 58, 69, 71–3, 199–200 & n.46 quarterage payments to  40 n.56, 56, 61, 69, 71 ranking of  63 relations with College of Arms  56, 61, 67, 76, 119, 129–38, 199 n.42 relations with non–members  7, 56–7, 61–2, 69–70, 83–4 relations with strangers  40, 42–3, 54, 56–9, 67, 69–70, 83–4, 144–5, 205 & n.4, 233–4 social and kinship ties within  55, 78–81 yeomanry  57 & n.3, 59 & n.10, 62 Painter-Stainers’ Hall  67, 73–6, 84, 121, 218 & n.59 painting as a hobby  66, 97, 217, 238–42 business of  197–200, 204–32 annuities  208–11, 218

arrangements with apprentices and journeymen  160–2, 167 arrangements with patrons  219–20, 225–6, 229 n.112 partnership and collaboration  42, 43, 79, 104, 107 & n.48, 118–19, 122–30, 133, 140–4, 148–53 & n.52, 163–4, 172, 215, 223–4 disputes over  56, 61, 124–37, 197 n.37 exhibits of  3 fraudulent and illicit  17, 117, 125–7, 129, 130, 134, 200 popularity of  7, 9, 11, 17, 23, 50, 91, 100–1, 122, 137, 145, 203 pre-Tudor  5, 7–8, 14, 16, 21 reputation of  5, 49, 209–10, 237–42 seasonality of  219–21 supplies and equipment  162, 192–3, 195, 219 brushes  44–5 & n.74, 191, 193, 219 grinding stones and mullers  193, 195, 219 ladders  195 & nn.26 & 27 paints and pigments  44, 67, 110, 144, 151, 191, 219–21 & n.73 panels 45 patterns  14, 85, 101, 110, 142, 160 techniques  32, 235–6 vernacular  10–11, 57, 85, 89–90, 101, 109–11, 138, 181, 234–6 paintings 10 collecting  196, 206, 216–17, 237 cost and value of  50, 205–6, 210–17 sale of  45, 71, 193, 196–200, 207, 217 in the Netherlands  83, 206–7, 234 trade in  15, 26, 44–5, 50, 53 & n.104, 121, 237 wall paintings  10–11, 16, 38, 111, 138 see also arms painting, decorative painting; glass painting, limning Parahesios 240 Pargiter, Clement  76 & n.90 Pargiter, Widow  76 n.90 Parker, Henry  126 Parker, Archbishop Matthew  217

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Parliament  26, 47, 60–2 & n.18, 70–1, 144 Statutes: 14/15 Henry VIII, c.2  26, 144 32 Henry VIII, c.16: Concerning Strangers  23–3, 165 5 Eliz, c.4: Statute of Artificers  56, 58, 61, 71, 84, 221 1 Jas. I, c.20: Abuses in painting  60–2 & nn.18 & 20 Patch the Fool  28 Patten, John  91–2 & n.16, 96 Paynter, Alice  167–8 Paynter, John  167 Peacham, Henry  242 Peachey, Thomas  195 n.27 Peacock, William  76 Peake, Robert  46, 52, 83–5, 234 reputation of  5, 208, 210, 235, 237 retail shop  84, 193–4, 196–7 workshop  164, 193, 218 Peake, William  194, 205 n.4 Peck, Professor Linda Levy  196 Penni, Bartholomeo  28, 30 Pepes, Kathren  45 Petitot, Jean  51, 166 Pettegree, Andrew   35 n.34, 40 Petty, John  141–2 Petty, Matthew  141 Petty, Robert  142 Petty family  141 Pevsner, Niklaus  4 Philip II, King of Spain  34, 174 Philipot, John  119 n.10 Phythian-Adams, Professor Charles  99 n.28 ‘picture-makers’, definition  41 n.61 plasterers  56, 70–1, 227 Plasterers, London Company of  59, 62, 67, 70–1 & n.62, 130 Pliny the elder  238–9 Plutarch 240 Plymouth 181 Pole (Poole?), Adrian  162 Polydorus 240 Poole (Dorset)  98 Poole, William  104, 179 n.84, 182–5, 188–9

Popeler, Anthony  46 Popeler, Daniel  46–9 portraits  5, 10 civic  75, 110, 214–16, 239 n.17 copying of  14, 51, 166, 173, 196, 210, 212, 214 miniatures  13, 123, 166, 174 see also individual sitters portraiture, medium of  3, 6, 7, 10, 16–17, 39, 53, 202–4 Potkyn, John  66, 199 n.44 Poulet, Quenton  14 Preston (Suffolk)  151–2 Preston, Robert  142 Preston family  141–2 Price, Richard  126, 131, 135 prints  14, 43–4, 101, 108, 216, 235, 237 Protestantism 6 Pulford, Thomas  169 n.48, 183, 189 Pulford, Widow (of Thomas)  189 Pulford family  104 n.39 Racket, George  195 n.26 Raglan Castle (Monmouthshire)  201 Randall, Tobias  76 n.92 Ranworth (Norfolk)  15 Reade, Stephen  76 n.92 Reade, Thomas  171 Reade, Widow  171 Reading (Berkshire)  10 St Lawrence Church  167 Republic of Letters  239–42 Reve, Thomas  143 Revels, Office of the  23–4, 27, 31, 53, 163, 220, 227–9 Reyce, Robert  151–2 Richard I, King  10 Richard II, King  25 Richard III, King  22 Richmond Friary  25 Richmond Palace  145 Rider, Richard  70 Robinson, Ralph  199 n.44 Robinson, William  128, 207 & n.15 Rocke, Thomas  163, 219 Roman Catholicism  6, 10, 28, 33, 96, 233 Rotherhithe (Surrey)  148

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Rowley, Stephen  133 Rubens, Pier Paul  4, 51 n.100, 211, 237 reputation  3, 4, 52–3, 57, 84, 202, 210, 240, 242 workshop  165 n.28, 166, 193 Rudland, Robert  155 Rutland, Francis Manners, 6th earl of 219 St John, Sir John  155 Salaboss, Melchoir  36–7 & Fig. 2 Sergeant Painter, office of  31–3, 64, 72, 163, 209, 218, 220 see also incumbents by name Scarlett, Richard  89–90 & Fig. 6, 123–4, 198, 205, 223 Schilders, Richard  49 scriveners  12–13, 65, 121 Scriveners’ Company of London  12, 121 Scrots, Guillem  208 Scudamore, John  201–2 Sedgwick, William  120 & n.15 See, Richard  124 Segar, Sir William  121, 135, 198 & n.41, 207 & n.10, 210, 234–5, 237 & n.7 Selby, Thomas  220 Sergeant, John  138 Serlio, Sebastian  84, 193 Sewell, Thomas  167 Sewell, wife of Thomas  167 Seymour, Queen Jane  27 Shelsley Walsh (Worcestershire)  36 Shene, manor of (Surrey)  145 Sherborne, Bishop Robert  208 Sherman, [unknown]  200 ships, painting of  5, 163 & n.18, 211, 218–19 Shirley, Robert  152 shops, retail  126, 193–4, 193–203, 216 see also workshop space Shrewsbury (Shropshire)  180–1 Shute, John  242 Sidney, Sir Henry  129 Slingsby, Sir Henry  153 Smith, Jankyn  215, 239 n.17 Smith, Sir Thomas  38, 116 n.2 Smith, William  125–6, 198

Smithson, Christopher  199 n.44 Soame, Sir Stephen  71 social status  9, 11, 13, 16–17, 115–17, 126, 197, 233, 237–8 see also painters: social status Solario, Antonio  26–7 & n.15 Souch, John  101, 103–6 & Fig. 9, 108–9, 149–50, 160, 182–9 Southampton  14, 25–6, 36 Southwark  25, 36, 44 n.74, 144–5, 153, 193, 201 parishes of St Olave  42, 80 St Saviour  80 Spencer, Lord of Althorp  219 Spry (Sprie) family  181 Squibb, George  125 Staffordshire  109, 122 stainers  6, 11–12 Stainers’ Company of London  57–8 staining  6, 11–12 stationers  44, 101 Stationers’ Company of London  44–5, 65 Stationers of Chester  101, 162, 169–70, 181–9 Stedman, Edmund  199 Steenwyck, Hendrick  51 n.100, 165–6 Stephens, Richard  65 n.36 Stockton–on–Teme (Worcestershire)  36 Stow, John  11, 63 strangers  7–8, 14, 16, 21–54, 56–8, 82, 144–5, 233–4 denization  22, 145 restrictions on  7, 22–3, 40, 119, 144 stranger–painters  5, 7–8, 14, 16, 21–54, 143–8, 154–6, 163–6, 233–4 geographic distribution  15–16, 21, 25, 35–42, 82, 144–5 kinship ties  25, 40–2, 46, 143–9, 154–6, 165 reception of  7–8, 14, 16, 22–32, 35–47, 52–3, 144–5, 233–4 reputation of  27–32, 40, 49–50, 52–3, 174, 237 skills and training  7, 14, 24–5, 28–9, 32–3, 40–1, 47–9, 52, 57, 143–4, 146, 149, 235

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see also by name and/or nationality Strong, Sir Roy  86 & n.3, 236 Sudbury, John  216 Suffolk 100 gentry of  15 painters in  92–97 & Table 1, 99–100, 200, 215 n.96, 239–41 & nn.16 & 17, Fig. 15 St Mary’s Culford  240–1 see also East Anglia Sutton, Baptist  150, 153–6 Sutton, Thomas  219 Symonds, Simon  144, 146–7 Taye, Martin  40 n.57, 42 Taylor, John  63 n.26, 76, 131, 133, 135 & n.83, 223, 226 Teerlinc, Levina  32 & n.29, 167 & n.34 Tewkesbury Abbey (Gloucestershire) 115 Thaxted (Essex)  148, 150 ‘The Great Rebuilding’  64 n.34 Thetford (Norfolk)  93, 97 Thompson, John  122 n.25 Thompson, Richard  141 Thompson, Samuel  198 Thompson, William  141 Thompson family  141 Thornley, Robert  107 n.48, 224 Thorpe family  104, 169 n.48, 183, 189 tombs see monuments Torrentius, Jan  51–2 Torrigiano, Pietro  24, 26, 27, 29, 33 Toto, Antonio (Toto del Nunziata)  24, 27, 28, 31, 33, 46, 64, 124, 208 town halls and guildhalls  x Townshend, Hayward  58 n.4 trade foreign 15 routes 13 Trentham Hall (Staffordshire)  201 Tresham [Tressam], Sir Thomas  229 Treswell, Ralph the elder  63 Treswell, Ralph the younger  131, 135, 198 Typlady, Thomas  194–5 Unton, Sir Henry  89–90 & Fig. 6

Unton, Widow Dorothy  89 Van Belcamp, Jan  165, 211 Van Bentham, Martin  150, 205 & n.1 Van Blijenberch, Abraham  51 & n.94, 80 Van de Pitt (Vandepit), Andrew  41 Vanderkell, Hubert  45 Van Diepenbeck, Abraham  51 Van Dyck, Anthony  3, 24, 52, 121, 165–6 & n.27, 202 assistants  51 n.95, 165–6, 211, 223 fame  53, 57, 84, 202, 210, 237, 242 income 210–11 patronage of  84, 208, 210, 225 workshop  165–6, 193, 202, 210–11, 225 Van Honthorst, Gerritt  52, 84, 208, 211, 242 Van Leemput, Remigius  211 Van Lingen, Abraham  154–6 Van Lingen, Bernard  154–6 Van Mander, Karl  210 Van Ort, Arnold  143 Van Overbeeke, Paulus  49 Van Poehlenburg, Cornelius  51 & n.100, 165–6 Van Somer, Paul  51 n.94, Van Son, Adrian  49 Vanstemsyken, Gyllinge  42 Van Voerst, Robert  51 Vewick, Maynard  29, 209, 216 Villiers, George, see Buckingham, duke of Vintners’, London Company of  152–3 Volpe, Vincent  26–7, 208 Vroom, Hendrik Cornelisz  51–2 Wagner, Anthony  125 Walker, Hope  42–3 Walpole, Horace  145 Walsham–le–Willows (Suffolk)  98 Walsingham, Chapel of Our Lady (Norfolk) 145 Warham, Archbishop William  217 Watson, Robert  122 Waynfleet, Bishop William  152 weddings  117, 198 Welch family  104 n.39, 169 & n.48, 189

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Westminster  38, 81 Hall 24 St James’s Palace  153, 205 St Margaret’s Church  28, 154 St Martin–in–the–Fields  80–1 St Stephen’s Chapel  10 White, Sir Thomas  214 & n.42 Whitefriars 38 Whiteway, William  37–8 Whorewood, Field  135–6 Whythorne, Thomas  197 Wiggington, William  196–7 Wigmore, Thomas  70 Williamson (Willemzoen), Francis 146–7 Willingham, George  63 n.26 Wilton Diptych  10 Winchell, William  135–6, 198 Winchester Cathedral  28, 154 Windsor Palace  25, 28 Withie the elder, John  126, 132, 135 Withypool, Paul  26 Woking (Surrey)  25, 145 Woodstock Palace  25, 145 Worcester, William Somerset, 3rd earl of 201–2 workshop personnel  101, 140–3, 159–89, 218 generational continuity  140–2, 169–73 & n.48, 176–81

see also apprentices; journeymen; painters: secondary; painters: women: widows workshop space  104, 108–9, 190–203 and residence  106–7 & Fig. 11, 159, 192–5, 200–2, 208, 225 garrets  190–1 & n.2 in patrons’ estates  200–2 working conditions  190–5, 220–1 see also shops, retail Wotton, Sir Henry  240 Wright, Andrew  31, 218, 221 n.73 Wright, John of Chester  181–5 Wright, John of Leicester  162 Wriothesley, Thomas  122–3, 128 York, city of  87, 149, 160, 192 glass painters and glaziers  13, 141–2, 147–8, 236 see also by name Minster 141 Palace 145 Yorkshire  125, 147 More Monkton  153 Woodsome  126, 149 Young, Dean John  154 Young, Lancelot  151 Zouche, Francis, Lord  220

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STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN CULTURAL, POLITICAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY Details of volumes I–XXIV can be found on the Boydell & Brewer website. XXV ‎Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650–1750 ‎Craig Spence XXVI ‎Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland ‎Essays in Honour of John Walter ‎Edited by Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington XXVII ‎Commerce and Politics in Hume’s History of England ‎Jia Wei XXVIII ‎Bristol from Below: Law, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City ‎Steve Poole and Nicholas Rogers XXIX ‎Disaffection and Everyday Life in Interregnum England ‎Caroline Boswell XXX ‎ romwell’s House of Lords C ‎Politics, Parliaments and Constitutional Revolution, 1642–1660 ‎Jonathan Fitzgibbons XXXI ‎Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 ‎Edited by Valentina Caldari and Sara J. Wolfson XXXII ‎National Identity and the Anglo-Scottish Borderlands, 1552–1652 ‎Jenna M. Schultz XXXIII ‎Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London ‎Lena Liapi

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XXXIV ‎Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain ‎Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie ‎Edited by Justin Champion, John Coffey, Tim Harris and John Marshall XXXV ‎The Hanoverian Succession in Great Britain and its Empire ‎Edited by Brent S. Sirota and Allan I. Macinnes XXXVI ‎Age Relations and Cultural Change in Eighteenth-Century England ‎Barbara Crosbie XXXVII ‎The National Covenant in Scotland, 1638–1689 ‎Chris R. Langley XXXVIII ‎Visualising Protestant Monarchy: Ceremony, Art and Politics after the Glorious Revolution (1689–1714) ‎Julie Farguson XXXIX ‎Blood Waters: War, Disease and Race in the Eighteenth-Century British Caribbean ‎Nicholas Rogers XL The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England Edited by Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby ‎XLI ‎Africans in East Anglia, 1467–1833 ‎Richard C. Maguire‎ XLII ‎ oyalism, Religion and Revolution: Wales, 1640–1688 R ‎Sarah Ward Clavier

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